Olivia Arnold

Olivia Arnold joined Flagship Pioneering in 2023 after completing the Flagship Fellowship and now serves as an Associate. In this role, she works to ideate, originate, and build first-in-class bioplatform companies, partnering with entrepreneurial scientists to explore new areas of biology. She plays an active role in every stage of company creation, from shaping scientific vision and intellectual property to driving corporate and scientific strategy, most recently as part of the founding team of two seed-stage Flagship companies.

Prior to joining Flagship, Olivia completed her doctoral studies in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, where her thesis work leveraged DNA-based nanoparticles as a scaffold to investigate the impact of ligand spatial arrangement on vaccine responses, resulting in publications in Nature Biomedical Engineering and Nature Nanotechnology. She also obtained a certificate in Healthcare Management from MIT Sloan School of Management and a certificate in Therapeutic Sciences from Harvard Medical School. Her research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ‘Jean Strouse Sharf and Lisa Sharf Cancer Research’ Fellowship, and an MIT Presidential Fellowship. 

Alongside her doctoral work, she evaluated the commercialization potential of the DNA-based nanoparticle technology through the Nucleate Activator program and served as a Senior Business Development Fellow in Harvard's Office of Technology Development. Currently, Olivia serves on the board of the Synergist Network Boston chapter, a national nonprofit community of over 3,300 early-career women in venture, private equity, and investing.

Olivia received her Ph.D. in Medical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University.