Casper Hoogenraad serves as Vice President, Head of Neuroscience at Genentech Research and Early Development in South San Francisco, California. In this role, he is head of the Neuroscience Department, responsible for research and drug discovery activities in Neuroscience and oversees Genentech’s Neuroscience disease pipeline programs. He is Adjunct Professor in Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at University of California San Francisco (UCSF).

Prior to joining Genentech, he was full Professor of Molecular Neuroscience and served as Chair of the Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Biophysics Division at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Casper received his Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and Master of Science in Molecular Biology from Utrecht University, and his doctorate in Cell Biology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Casper was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and joined the faculty of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam as an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience.

Casper continues his basic research as a Senior Fellow at Genentech to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate the development and function of the brain and aims to translate these findings into potential therapies for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. Throughout his career, he discovered new molecular mechanisms and cell biological processes that control cytoskeleton remodeling and cargo trafficking. Work from his lab has characterized in detail the cytoskeleton and transport events required to 'build' and 'wire' neurons, including the early developmental stages of axon formation and neuronal polarization, assembly of the axon initial segment, dendrite outgrowth and spine plasticity. He has also contributed to the development of new molecular methods and imaging tools to study intracellular dynamics in living cells.