Dima Kuzmin, PhD

Dima Kuzmin joined the Yale Faculty in 2021 as an Assistant Professor (Adjunct) in the School of Medicine.

Throughout his academic career, Dr. Kuzmin focused on tool development for CNS gene therapy. During his doctorate, Dima contributed to co-founding the field of chemogenetics (controlling cells in the body with gene therapies activated by small molecule drugs). His work has been published in leading journals and is a part of several gene therapies advancing towards clinical trials. During his postdoctoral fellowship at UCL, Dr. Kuzmin also contributed to using optogenetics and chemogenetics to understand how information gets processed in the brain, the role of oscillations in the transmission and encoding of information, and the construction of novel brain-computer interfaces. His ultimate goal is to find, support, and enable curative therapies for chronic diseases, and make them available to the global population.

His research focuses on clinical trial design, post-registrational assessment, and ethics of access to one-time, curative therapies, such as gene therapy and cell therapy.

Besides academia, Dima is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at 4BIO Capital, an international venture capital firm focused solely on the advanced therapies sector. Dr. Kuzmin serves on the boards of Redpin Therapeutics, Araris Biotech, Hornet Therapeutics, SparingVision SA, and Code Biotherapeutics. Dr. Kuzmin co-founded, funded, and led Future Biotech, a non-profit education initiative that nurtures future biotechnology entrepreneurs in Central and Eastern Europe.

Dima holds an MSc in Biochemistry and Medical Biochemistry from Lomonosov Moscow State University, a Ph.D. in Neurochemistry from the Russian Academy of Sciences and MPIH Frankfurt, and an MSc in Experimental Therapeutics from the University of Oxford (with Distinction). He completed post-doctoral studies at the University College London Institute of Neurology. He is a Kauffman Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.