Dr. Khurana is the inaugural incumbent of the Tracy T. Batchelor Endowed Chair in Neurology at MassGeneral Brigham, Chief of the Movement Disorders Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He holds faculty appointments at the Ann Romney Center of Neurologic Diseases, Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is a faculty mentor in the Harvard Neuroscience and Biological and Biomedical Science Ph.D. programs.

Dr Khurana grew up in Sydney, Australia, and is a medical graduate of the University of Sydney. He came to Boston as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001, obtaining his Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University in 2006. He completed his residency in neurology at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals, and Fellowship training in movement disorders and ataxia at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also completed postdoctoral training in the laboratories of Drs Susan Lindquist and Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute, where, along with his wife Chee Yeun Chung, he led a study that succeeded in identifying and reversing pathologies in stem cell models of Parkinson’s disease.

At MassGeneral Brigham, Dr Khurana leads i) the Harvard Biomarkers Study (HBS 2.0), one of the most extensive longitudinal biomarker and natural history studies of neurodegenerative disease patients worldwide; ii) the precision medicine (MyTrial) program; iii) the American Parkinson’s Disease Association (APDA) Center for Advanced Research; iv) the Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) Center of Excellence. He is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF), APDA and Mission MSA and has co-founded two biotech companies focused on developing neurodegenerative disease therapies.

The Khurana Lab has pioneered “systems cell biology” – the combination of stem-cell biology, genomics and high-throughput cellular analyses – to understand the diverse presentations and outcomes of neurodegenerative diseases (“patient heterogeneity”), and to ultimately develop precision medicines. The lab focuses on “synucleinopathies”: degenerative movement disorders related to aggregation of the alpha-synuclein (aSyn) protein in the brain.