Sabrina Yang

Sabrina Yang is Vice President, Global Initiatives at Flagship Pioneering, where she leads strategic efforts to expand and scale Flagship’s global presence and initiatives. In this role, Sabrina focuses on developing strategic institutional partnerships across the U.S., Europe, APAC, and emerging hubs to scale Flagship’s innovation model. Since joining in 2017, she has helped conceive, create, and develop first-in-category therapeutic platform companies and now works across the enterprise to drive Flagship’s international growth.

Sabrina is the Co-Founder and former Chief Innovation Officer of Empress Therapeutics, where she pioneered a novel metagenomics and synthetic biology platform for small molecule drug discovery. Before joining Flagship, she was a postdoctoral researcher and NSF-funded translational fellow at MIT, where she worked to translate her academic research into commercial opportunities.

During her Ph.D., Sabrina worked in the lab of Darrell Irvine and developed a cell membrane-penetrating nanoparticle technology to deliver drug payloads to T-cells in vivo, overcoming tumor-mediated immunosuppression and improving cancer immunotherapy efficacy. Her graduate work resulted in publication in multiple peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Communications and several pending patents. She also pursued research as an undergraduate, engineering nanomaterials for MRI/CT dual molecular imaging contrast agents, which resulted in several publications and an issued patent.

Sabrina holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in materials science and engineering from MIT and a B.S. in materials science and engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, where she graduated summa cum laude and was valedictorian.