Maya Jay

Maya Jay joined Flagship Pioneering as an Associate in 2023, where she leads company creation and origination efforts for Flagship’s life science ventures.

Prior to joining Flagship, Maya completed her doctoral work in Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, where her work centered on neuromodulatory mechanisms underlying adaptive decision-making in behaving mammals. She utilized advanced machine vision methods and high-throughput, in vivo neural recording and manipulation approaches to demonstrate a critical role for the neurochemical dopamine in structuring animal behavior from moment-to-moment. Her work has been featured in journals such as Nature and Nature Methods, presented at numerous computational and systems neuroscience conferences worldwide, and earned her a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Predoctoral Research Fellowship. Prior to her graduate studies, Maya conducted numerous research projects exploring the neurobiology of PTSD, sleep, aging, motor control, and reward-guided navigation.

In addition to her research, Maya previously held a business development fellowship appointment at Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, where she assisted company creation and licensing efforts for early-stage IP from biotechnology entrepreneurs. She completed the Flagship Fellowship in 2022, furthering her interest in company creation. Maya also devoted significant energy to mentoring and bettering the next generation of academic scientists by championing numerous diversity and inclusion initiatives, for which she earned multiple service awards and recognitions across the Harvard Medical ecosystem.

Maya earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University, and her B.S. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.