Sophie Miller

Sophie Miller joined Flagship Pioneering in 2025 after completing the 2024 Flagship Fellowship. She works with a venture creation team to conceive and build first-in-class bioplatform companies, contributing to scientific direction, operations, and business strategy for early-stage ventures.

Sophie completed her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Caltech in Prof. David Tirrell’s lab. She developed chemical tools to do time-resolved proteomics in neuronal systems, applying bioorthogonal noncanonical amino acid tagging (BONCAT) to study transient changes in protein expression in zebrafish larvae in the context of stress and sleep and in rat brains in response toantidepressant treatment. Her earlier research spanned porous nanomaterials for drug delivery during her Master's and flexible, stretchable materials for electronic skin applications during her undergraduate studies. Prior to Flagship, Sophie also participated in Fifty Years’ 5050 founder development program.

Passionate about mentorship and teaching, Sophie received Caltech’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Three Minute Thesis People’s Choice Award. Outside the lab, she is an avid rower, which landed her a cameo in the Apple TV+ series Lessons in Chemistry, and a jazz saxophonist, having performed in jazz big bands alongside world-renowned artists around the world, including at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

Sophie holds a Ph.D. and a M.S. from the California Institute of Technology, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and Rosen Bioengineering Center Scholar. She received herM.Phil. in Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar supervised by of Dr. David Fairen-Jimenez. Prior to that, she graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with Distinction and Departmental Honors from Stanford University, where she was a Goldwater Scholar and received numerous awards recognizing her academic achievements and her research in Prof. Zhenan Bao’s lab.