Robert Vassar

Robert Vassar, PhD, is the Davee Professor of Alzheimer Research, Department of Neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. He is Director of the Mesulam Institute for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease, Scientific Director of Behavioral Neurology, and Director of the Northwestern Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Dr. Vassar received his PhD in in 1992 in Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology with Dr. Elaine Fuchs at the University of Chicago studying transgenic mouse models of epidermal disease. He then pursued a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Richard Axel at Columbia University where he investigated the molecular neurobiology of olfaction, work that contributed to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004. After his postdoc, he joined the biotechnology company Amgen to identify novel drug targets for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Using expression cloning, he and his team co-discovered the beta-secretase enzyme, beta-site amyloid precursor pr