Roger M. Perlmutter is the former executive vice president of Merck & Co. and former president of Merck Research Laboratories. He is currently a non-executive director of Merck Research Laboratories. He graduated from Reed College and earned his MD and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1979. He did his clinical training in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and University of California, San Francisco. In 1981, he joined the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology before joining the University of Washington in 1984 to join the medicine and biochemistry department. At Caltech he worked closely with Leroy Hood, an important immunologist and later recruited Hood to the University of Washington to serve as founding professor of the Department