Vikram (Vik) Khurana, MD, PhD

Dr. Khurana is a Co-Founder of DaCapo Brainscience. Dr. Khurana is Chief of the Division of  Movement Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School,  where he also leads the Dr. B.R. and Dr. C.R. Shetty Initiative in Parkinsonian Disorders. He  is Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Associate Member of the Broad  Institute of Harvard and MIT, and Senior Advisor to Yumanity Therapeutics, a company he  co-founded in 2014. His clinical and research interests relate to neurodegenerative  disorders focusing on Parkinson’s disease (PD) and related dementias, rarer disorders  including multiple system atrophy and ataxias. Patients with these disorders are seen by  him at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. 

Dr. Khurana is a medical graduate of the University of Sydney, Australia, and came to  Boston as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001, obtaining his Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard  University in 2006. He completed his neurology residency at Brigham and Women’s and  Massachusetts General Hospitals, and fellowship in movement disorders and ataxia at  Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was on the faculty from 2012 to 2016. Dr.  Khurana received postdoctoral training in the laboratories of Drs. Susan Lindquist and  Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (MIT), at which time he  led some of the first studies to identify and reverse pathologies in human stem cells  derived from PD patients. 

His current research continues to bring stem-cell technologies toward personalized and  precise diagnostics and therapeutics for neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Khurana’s  research has been recognized through awards from the American Academy of Neurology,  American Australian Association, Department of Defense, Multiple System Atrophy Coalition, National Ataxia Foundation Parkinson’s Disease Foundation and the NIH. In  2018, he was named a Robertson Investigator of the New York Stem Cell Foundation.