Gabriel Vargas

Executive Medical Director and Head of the General Medicine, Bone & Neuroscience Therapeutic Area in Early Development, Amgen (CA, USA)

Gabriel Vargas, MD, PhD is a board certified psychiatrist and basic scientist. Gabriel obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley (CA, USA) where he majored in anthropology & genetics. He received his MD and PhD degrees from the University of California at Irvine (CA, USA) and went on to complete a basic science research track residency in Psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF, CA, USA).

After both a clinical and research fellowship he was appointed an assistant professor in the Psychiatry Department at UCSF where he spent 3 years leading a research group studying G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling and trafficking. He also served as the Medical Director of the UCSF prodromal schizophrenia research program. He has published in the areas of GPCR signaling and membrane trafficking with a particular expertise in approaches using basic science to understand the molecular pathophysiology of genetic diseases. After leaving academia in 2006 he spent five years at Roche the last three in Basel (Switzerland) as Head of the CNS Biomarker Group where he worked on biomarkers and diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease, autism and schizophrenia.

He joined Amgen in 2011 and leads a group of physician-scientists doing early development work on migraine, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. He is currently Executive Medical Director and Head of the General Medicine, Bone & Neuroscience Therapeutic Area in Early Development at Amgen.