ferid Murad

After his initial stint at Stanford, he spent time as Vice President of Pharmaceutical Research and Clinical Development at Abbott Laboratories (1988 - 1993), and was founder and president of Molecular Geriatrics, a biotechnology company focused on Alzheimer’s Disease.

He also spent several years at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology and Director Emeritus of the Institute of Molecular Medicine. He was also later Professor of Biochemistry at George Washington University, before his current position at Stanford.  

Professor Murad’s discovery in 1977 of Nitric Oxide as an important intra and extracellular signaling messenger was referred to by the American Heart Association as the most important discovery in cardiovascular medicine. There are today over 160,000 research papers globally which build on this discovery, with numerous subsequent novel drugs discovered for a variety of medical problems. He has won numerous prizes and academic awards ever since, including 21 honorary degrees from national and international universities around the world, and the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1998.  

Professor Murad continued to lecture and teach, with many of his lab students going on to become professors, departmental chairs, medical school deans, and university presidents globally. His most recent research focused on stem cells, gene regulation, and cancer. He also advised for several biotechnology companies, including on the uses of Nitric Oxide to combat COVID-19.