Ayşe Muñiz

Ayşe Muñiz joined Flagship Pioneering after completing the 2020 Flagship Pioneering Fellowship. She initially helped Pioneering Medicines build its exploration team to seed ideas for its pipeline. As a Principal, she now originates and builds new AI-first companies across life sciences and enterprise applications on Armen Mkrtchyan’s team.

Over the course of her academic career, Ayse gained broad interdisciplinary experience at the intersection of materials science, bioengineering, computational biology, and medicine. During her Ph.D., she worked in Joerg Lahann’s lab at the University of Michigan and developed an engineered extracellular matrix platform to support tumor microenvironments and human stem cell-derived heart and brain tissues for disease modeling and tissue engineering applications. Her work combined single-cell sequencing, proteomics, and integrated computational modeling to unravel the role the extracellular matrix plays in driving cell and tissue behavior. As an undergraduate, she worked in Jeffrey Brinker’s lab to develop nanotherapeutics for targeted delivery of small molecules and nucleic acids. Additionally, during her time as an undergraduate, she conducted summer research in Kristala Prather’s lab through the MIT Summer Research Program.

Ayse’s scientific work has led to several publications, awarded patents, and recognition through various awards. Additionally, Ayse has engaged in numerous entrepreneurial and outreach activities, including leading the healthcare vertical of the Zell Lurie Commercialization Fund at the Ross School of Business, co-founding REACT at the University of Michigan, and leading the NSF Cellular Metamaterials Engineering Research Center student leadership council for three years, where she worked with a team to develop a drug screening platform start-up.

Ayse received her Ph.D. in Macromolecular Science & Engineering from the University of Michigan, where she was a Rackham Merit Fellow and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry summa cum laude from the University of New Mexico and was a MARC Scholar.