Amy Easton, Ph.D.

Amy Easton, Ph.D., serves as Vice President of Scientific Programs at Target ALS. 

Amy earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Northwestern University’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program in 2002 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University before moving into industry. She spent nearly a decade at Bristol-Myers Squibb leading a laboratory focused on preclinical translational research in neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disease, generating in vivo proof-of-concept, PK/PD, and IND-enabling data packages for drug discovery programs in schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. In 2016, she became Head of Translational Neuroscience at Genentech, where she spent seven years supporting preclinical research for neurodegenerative disease programs, working closely with scientists across functional areas to advance ALS programs through preclinical and clinical development. She also helped shape Genentech’s broader neuroscience strategy through her work on new therapeutic modalities, including antisense oligonucleotides.

Amy joined Target ALS in 2022, bringing 20 years of drug discovery experience and a track record of using technology and unconventional methods to take on hard scientific problems. What keeps her in this work is simple: she wants to see a world where everyone with ALS lives, and she believes that world is reachable if the research community moves fast enough and breaks down the barriers that slow it down. That sense of urgency shapes everything she oversees at Target ALS—a $20 million annual research portfolio, the development of new research tools and resources, and AGRI (A Global ALS Research Initiative), the largest clinical program designed to identify new genetic and environmental risk factors from a diverse patient population. She is a member of the Research Directors Forum for the International Alliance of ALS/MND and collaborates widely with leaders across neurodegenerative disease to advance new biomarkers and therapeutics for ALS.