Dr. Tim Ahfeldt's career in biotechnology and academia is anchored by 17 years of diligent research, specializing in in vitro technologies such as gene editing and disease modeling using human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Ahfeldt is an experienced scientific leader who combines in-depth expertise in stem cell biology, automation, data science, and machine learning to accelerate drug discovery and identify innovative therapies for patients with unmet medical needs.
Now serving as the Vice President of Advanced Translational Modeling at Recursion, Dr. Ahfeldt is shaping the company’s neuroscience scientific strategy and spearheading the expansion of the Recursion OS to include multi-modal maps of the human brain. In this role, he oversees transformational neuroscience collaborations and partnerships with industry giants like Roche/Genentech, and directs a large cross-functional team focused on using innovative stem cell-based models in drug discovery. The long-term goal of this effort is to identify new therapeutics for patients suffering from neurodegenerative disorders.
Dr. Ahfeldt joined Recursion from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he was an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience and Neurology departments. He trained at Harvard University in the laboratories of Chad Cowan and Lee Rubin, where he pioneered methods to generate human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) and use them in novel differentiation processes. In particular, he has used hiPSCs to model and understand the impact of genetic risk factors on the development of metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases, through the derivation of white and brown adipocytes as well as massively scalable neural organoid models. At Recursion, Dr. Ahfeldt and his team applied this expertise to develop novel processes to generate and scale the production of hundreds of billions of high-quality hiPSC-derived neuronal cells to accelerate the company’s neurology research.
Prior to his career in science, Dr. Ahfeldt served as a police detective in Berlin, Germany. When not in the lab, he enjoys cooking for his family and friends, engaging in all-season outdoor activities, and PC gaming.
