About Richard Schneider, PhD

Dr. Rich Schneider grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1991. Following an undergraduate internship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Rich published his first paper, which was on the development and evolution of the skull in wolves and domestic dogs. He received his Master's Degree in 1994 and his Doctoral Degree in 1998 from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Both of his graduate thesis projects focused on skeletal development and evolution in birds and mammals. Rich also studied embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. For his Postdoctoral work at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), Rich investigated molecular mechanisms that pattern the craniofacial skeleton. In 2001, Rich joined the faculty of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCSF. Rich is currently the Director of the Laboratory for Developmental and Evolutionary Skeletal Biology.

Rich's research has been focused on understanding how individual components of the craniofacial complex achieve their proper size, shape, and functional integration during development and evolution. To address this question, Rich has created a surgical transplantation system that involves two distinct species of birds (quail and duck), which differ considerably in their growth rates and anatomy. The experimental approach is straightforward: stem cells that give rise to craniofacial structures are exchanged between quail and duck embryos. This causes faster developing quail cells and relatively slower maturing duck cells to interact with one another continuously within chimeric "quck" and "duail" embryos. Also, chimeras are challenged to integrate species-specific differences in size and shape between the donor and host. By looking for donor-induced changes to the formation of bone, cartilage, muscle, tendon, nerves, and other tissues, Rich has been able to identify molecular and cellular mechanisms that pattern the craniofacial complex. A goal is to devise novel therapies for regenerating tissues affected by birth defects, disease, and trauma. Rich's work has also helped elucidate the role of development in evolution.

For more than a decade, Rich has also have been vigorously engaged in issues related to scholarly communications and open access. He served as Chair on both the UCSF (COLASC) and the UC System-wide (UCOLASC) library committees of the Academic Senate, and he led the effort to develop and pass an Open Access Policy for UCSF Faculty in 2012. In addition, he helped develop a UC System-wide Open Access Policy in 2013 and served on a Presidential Task Force to expand the Open Access Policy to the entire UC System, which was implemented in 2015.