James V. Cassella, Ph.D.
’76 B.A. Psychology
Senior Vice President, Research and Development
Alexza Pharmaceuticals
James V. Cassella, Ph.D., joined Alexza Pharmaceuticals as senior vice president of Research and Development in June 2004. Cassella's responsibilities include the oversight of new technology research, product research and development, non-clinical and clinical development, and regulatory affairs.
From April 1989 to April 2004, he held various management positions at Neurogen Corporation, including senior vice president of Clinical Research and Development. As one of Neurogen's original employees in 1989, he established the Behavioral Biology Department, which was instrumental in developing and utilizing animal models to predict human efficacy and side effects of new drug candidates.
In 1994, he established the Clinical Development Department, which was responsible for the design of development plans and conducting of human clinical trials for new drug candidates. In this capacity, Cassella has taken novel neurologic and psychiatric drugs through various stages of clinical development.
Before joining Neurogen, he was an assistant professor of neuroscience at Oberlin College, where his private and federal grant-supported research focused on the neural mechanisms underlying various behaviors in rodents related to psychiatric disorders in humans.
He received his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from Dartmouth College and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. His training at Dartmouth and Yale centered on understanding the pharmacological mechanisms underlying various psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, schizophrenia and depression, and furthering the understanding of learning and memory processes as well as memory disorders. Cassella graduated from UNH in 1976 with a degree in Psychology.