Roger M Perlmutter

Dr. Perlmutter is the Executive Vice President and President of Merck Research Laboratories. From 2001 until 2012, he was the Executive Vice President for Research and Development at Amgen. He was responsible for the registration of ten significant new drugs including Sensipar™, Prolia™ and Xgeva™. Prior to joining Amgen, Dr. Perlmutter was for many years Professor and Chairman of the Department of Immunology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He also served as Executive Vice President for Worldwide Discovery and Preclinical Research at Merck & Co. Dr. Perlmutter is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A graduate of Reed College (Portland, Oregon), Dr. Perlmutter received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University (St. Louis) in 1979. Thereafter he pursued clinical training in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and at the University of California at San Francisco. From 1981 to 1984 he was a Lecturer in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He joined the Departments of Medicine and Biochemistry and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1984, and in 1989 became Professor and founding Chairman of the Department of Immunology there. During this period, Dr. Perlmutter focused his scientific efforts on the elucidation of signaling pathways governing lymphocyte development and activation. In 1997 he left the University of Washington to join Merck and Co., ultimately rising to the rank of Executive Vice President, Worldwide Basic and Preclinical Research. He left Merck in 2001 to join Amgen in California. Dr. Perlmutter is also a director of Stem Cells, Inc., a Trustee of Reed College, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Systems Biology, a not-for-profit research institute based in Seattle, Washington. He was previously President of the American Association of Immunologists, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.