Lena Afeyan

Lena Afeyan is Head of UK Science Strategy and Innovation at Flagship Pioneering, where she leads internal scientific strategy, drives R&D collaborations to supercharge Flagship’s current and future companies, and bridges Flagship’s innovation ecosystem with universities, private and public partners, and investors in the UK and Europe.

These efforts have included working with the MHRA to create an unprecedented Regulatory Innovation Corridor, shaping a partnership with the Francis Crick Institute to explore novel models for collaborative research, and driving policy thought leadership on where the UK can lead in AI-native biotech in efforts with the Tony Blair Institute. Alongside her role at Flagship, Lena serves on the Industry Advisory Board of the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

Prior to joining Flagship, Lena held strategic leadership and advisory roles across the UK life sciences ecosystem, including at the Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Therapeutics Accelerator, the Fleming Initiative, and a genomic medicine venture studio she co-founded. Earlier in her career, she helped develop strategy for early-stage biotechnology companies and built practitioner-led training programs as President of the MIT Biotech Group and the Harvard Biotech Club.

Lena holds a B.A. from Harvard University, a Ph.D. from MIT, and an MBA from the University of Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar. A recipient of the MIT Presidential Fellowship and the NIH NRSA Ph.D. Fellowship, her research on biomolecular condensates in drug development and genome editing in the labs of Richard Young at the Whitehead Institute and David R. Liu at the Broad Institute has been published across top journals, including Science, Developmental Cell, Cell, and Nature.