Dirk joined SV in 2020 and is a Principal in the Dementia Discovery Fund team. He helps form and fund companies developing transformational new medicines for dementia.
Dirk carries out due diligence of new deals, and provides strategic, BD, and operational support to existing companies in the DDF portfolio supporting them in bringing drugs from discovery to market.
Prior to joining SV/DDF, Dirk was an Associate Director in the External Innovation group at Biogen in Cambridge, MA, where he led the evaluation and scientific due diligence for Business Development opportunities in several therapeutic areas including Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS) and remyelination/repair, hearing loss, stroke/TBI, epilepsy, and new technologies/approaches to enhance brain drug delivery.
Before joining Biogen in April 2016, Dirk was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Susan Lindquist’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, investigating the underlying mechanisms of protein misfolding toxicities associated with neurodegenerative diseases. During his postdoc, Dirk obtained a fellowship from the American Parkinson’s Disease Association (APDA).
Academic Credentials
Dirk received his PhD from Harvard University in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. His thesis research combined quantitative biology with cutting-edge method development in microscopy to study protein degradation, aggregation, and stress response pathways in single cells. He also holds BSc and MSc degrees in Biochemistry from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Dirk has co-authored publications in multiple scientific journals, including Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Nature Protocols, Cell, and Molecular Cell. Dirk is also an inventor on several patent applications.
