Dr. Perlmutter is President, Chief Executive Officer, and Board Chair of Eikon Therapeutics, a private biotechnology company that employs advanced imaging technologies to identify novel therapeutic candidates by virtue of their effects on protein dynamics in living cells. He was previously Executive Vice President, Merck & Co., and President of Merck Research Laboratories where he supervised the discovery and development of numerous lifesaving medicines including KEYTRUDA™. Before this, Dr. Perlmutter spent 12 years as Executive Vice President and head of R&D at Amgen and prior to assuming leadership roles in industry, Dr. Perlmutter was a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and served as Chairman of its Department of Immunology while also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Perlmutter is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and both a Distinguished Fellow and past president of the American Association of Immunologists.