Maria Kousi

Maria Kousi, PhD, is Director of Life Science Investments at a Private Family Office in Palo Alto, CA since October 2024. Maria has trained in human genetics and neuroscience, with the goal to understand the genetic mechanisms leading to neurological diseases.

Maria was at Third Rock Ventures (TRV) from 2018 to 2024, doing early company creation at the intersection of genetics and neuroscience. She has led the efforts on the creation of companies offering genetics-based diagnostic solutions, individualized treatments to children with neurological diseases and therapeutic approaches in psychiatric disease under a precision medicine paradigm.

Prior to TRV, Maria was a senior scientist at MIT and Harvard, focusing on the elucidation of genetic mechanisms leading to late-onset neurodegenerative diseases. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, leading the efforts on the clinical diagnosis of children with neurological disease using WES and functional dissection of variant effect in surrogate animal disease models. She holds a PhD in human genetics of childhood onset progressive myoclonic epilepsies from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a master’s degree in human genetics from the same institution.