Robert Bowser, PhD is the Chief Scientific Officer, Professor and Chair of the Department of Translational Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

He obtained his PhD at Yale University School of Medicine, and was a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine prior to his recruitment to the Barrow in 2011 to create an ALS Research Center. His laboratory has performed biomarker discovery and validation research for over 25 years, providing mechanistic insights into disease and biomarkers used for drug development and monitoring therapeutic impact in clinical trials.

He is co-Director of the NIH/NINDS funded ALL ALS National ALS Clinical Research Consortium that collects longitudinal clinical information, biofluids, speech, digital health measures and patient reported outcomes for participants with symptomatic ALS, healthy controls and asymptomatic gene carriers. He is also the Director of the Target ALS funded Global Natural History Study and Postmortem Tissue Core. Among his many awards, he was the recipient of Sheila Essey Award for ALS Research in 2015 and the Sean M. Healey International Prize for Innovation in ALS in 2023. He has started three biotechnology companies and consultants for a number of biotech and pharma companies in the ALS and FTD drug development space.