Director of the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President, Boston Scientific Corporation
Jay Schnitzer was born in Springfield, MA, and attended public schools in Springfield and Longmeadow, graduating class valedictorian from Longmeadow High School as an Eagle Scout. He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA, graduating in 1973 with a BS in chemical engineering with high distinction. He subsequently completed a PhD in chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA in 1983, and graduated from Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA in 1983 with an MD cum laude. He trained in general surgery at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, from 1983–1988, spent a year performing trauma surgery in the Gaza Strip, then completed his pediatric surgery fellowship at Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA from 1989–1991. After a year on staff at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, he returned to Boston on staff at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served as a visiting surgeon (attending pediatric surgeon), with a joint appointment at the Shriners Burns Hospital, Boston, for 15 years. He is an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He joined Boston Scientific Corporation in April 2008 as Associate Chief Medical Officer and Vice President. In January, 2010 he was promoted to Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President.
Dr. Schnitzer’s credentials include board certification (and recertification) in general surgery and in pediatric surgery. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (FACS) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (FAAP). He is an Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) provider and instructor, is Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) and Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) certified, is an Advanced Burn Life Support (ABLS) provider and instructor, and an Advanced Trauma Operative Management (ATOM) provider and instructor.
Dr. Schnitzer is a member of several national and international societies, including the American Surgical Association, the Association for Academic Surgery, the American Pediatric Surgical Association, the Surgical Biology Club I, the Boston Surgical Society, the American Burn Association, the New England Surgical Society, and the British Association of Pediatric Surgeons, to name a few.
He is the surgical team leader of the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) International Medical Surgical Response Team (east) (IMSuRT-E). His deployments include New York City on September 11, 2001, and Bam, Iran following the earthquake in December, 2003. His research interests explore the interface between healthcare simulation and medical disaster preparedness and mass casualty disaster response, as a logical combination of his engineering training and experience coupled with his field experience in international medicine and disaster response; developmental biology of the lung, congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH), and intratracheal pulmonary ventilation (ITPV); and the intersection of pediatric surgery, chemical engineering, and developmental biology. He has been the principle investigator on multiple peer-reviewed research grants (NIH and others), and has many peer-reviewed publications.
At the MGH he was site miner for CIMIT (Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology), led the CIMIT Clinical Systems innovation (CSI) program, and chaired an MGH taskforce to develop a new comprehensive hospital based simulation-library learning center.
At Boston Scientific Corporation, Dr. Schnitzer is responsible for clinical and medical oversight of four of the company’s divisions: Endoscopy, Urology/Gynecology, Neurovascular, and Neuromodulation. These clinical activities encompass the entire life cycle of the medical devices from upstream “white space,” through prototype development and clinical trials, and ultimately including postmarket surveillance.
He is married to Sara Roy, and they live in Boston with their daughters Anne and Jess.
