Khurana Among Cosmos Bright Sparks
Vikram Khurana, MD, PhD, Department of Medicine, was named one of Australia’s top 10 scientific minds under the age of 45 by COSMOS magazine and selected to join the inaugural Cosmos Bright Sparks. This group was profiled in a special feature in the August/September issue of COSMOS magazine, and its new members feted with an awards night in August at ABC Studios in Sydney.
Khurana earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and mathematics and a concurrent medical degree from the University of Sydney in 2000, and a PhD in Neuroscience from HMS in 2006. He became interested in Alzheimer’s disease through his combined interests in neuroscience, philosophy and public health. Under the mentorship of Mel Feany, MD, PhD, associate professor of Pathology at BWH, Khurana studied the effect of expressing Alzheimer’s disease-related proteins in the nervous systems of fruit flies. They identified genes that may affect the progression of the disease.
“I wasn’t going to become a neurologist unless I could try and solve some of these problems,” Khurana said. “My goal is to work at the boundary between the lab and patient care.”