Dr. Paul Gasser is chair of the University Academic Senate (UAS) and associate professor of biomedical sciences. In addition to UAS, he has served Marquette as a member of the Committee on Teaching, the University Board of Graduate Studies, the Patent Review Council, and as member and chair of the Committee on Research. As chair of UAS, he works with faculty, staff and administrators to ensure that Marquette maintains its unique role as not only a place where students prepare for careers or further training, but also a place where they learn to see other perspectives, to think deeply about bigger questions and to do their part to tackle the world’s problems.

Gasser received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology and physiology from the University of Wyoming and his Ph.D. in biology from Arizona State University. From 2005 to 2007 he was a National Science Foundation International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience and Endocrinology at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom). He joined the Marquette faculty in 2007. His research, which has been funded by NSF and the National Institutes of Health, focuses on the mechanisms by which stress hormones alter cellular function in the brain, with the goal of understanding how chronic stress contributes to the pathology of neuropsychiatric disorders, neurodegenerative disease and cancer. This work is carried out in collaboration with undergraduate and Ph.D. students and is published in journals including the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Comparative Neurology and Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he was awarded Marquette’s  Way Klingler Research Fellowship.

Gasser teaches courses in biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience and the neurobiology of depressive illness to undergraduate and Ph.D. students. In 2011, he received the College of Health Sciences Edward W. Carroll Award for Teaching Excellence, and in 2016 he was awarded Marquette’s Rev. John P. Raynor, S.J., Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.