Beginning in 2024, Dr. Snyder serves as the Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of North Dakota. Prior to this appointment, Scott served for five years as Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Idaho State University (2018-2023). Scott simultaneously served for 18 months (2019-2020) as ISU’s interim Vice President for Research. In Idaho, Dr. Snyder served on a number of advisory boards, including Idaho’s Leadership in Nuclear Energy Commission, the steering committee for the Center for Advanced Energy Studies, the Governor’s Cybersecurity Task Force and the Idaho Regional Optical Network board.

Prior to his time at ISU, Dr. Snyder served as Chief Research Officer at the University of Nebraska Omaha for eight years (2010- 2018). For five of those years (2013-2018), Snyder also held the position of interim Executive Director of the Peter Kiewit Institute, an engineering and information technology research and teaching institute of the University of Nebraska System. Snyder led federal relations efforts for the UNO campus, served as an advisor to the Strategic Advisory Group of the United States Strategic Command, was a board member of the National Strategic Research Institute and was ex officio on the board of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s technology transfer organization UNeMed.

Dr. Snyder first joined UNO in 2001 as a faculty member in the Department of Biology. During his time at UNO, Scott served for two years (2008-2010) as a Program Director with the National Science Foundation where he worked across multiple federal agencies to help initiate the Dimensions of Biodiversity grants program. Scott previously held a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (1998-2001) and was an NSF/Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Evolution at the University of New Mexico (1996-1998). Snyder earned his Ph.D. in parasitology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (1996), where he also earned his B.S. in biology (1989). His M.S., also in parasitology, comes from Wake Forest University (1992).