Robert A. Lewis is a physician-scientist whose career has been evenly divided between academics and the pharmaceutical industry. He received his first degree from Yale in chemistry, his MD from the University of Rochester, and post-graduate training in pediatric medicine, allergy, rheumatology, and immunology at Harvard. After ten years on the Harvard faculty, with his lab focused on immediate hypersensitivity biochemistry and cell biology, he moved to Syntex in Palo Alto as Head of Basic Research for 10 years, where he was also on the faculty of medicine at Stanford. His subsequent career was comprised of another decade in biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry, retiring from Aventis as Senior Vice President, US R&D in 2004. Since then he has been a biotech and pharma consultant and is a Consulting Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has published over 150 papers and book chapters on mast cells and lipid mediators of immune signaling