Tobias Wauer

Tobias Wauer joined Flagship Pioneering in 2024 as a Senior Associate. He is a member of the origination team led by Lovisa Afzelius and focuses on conceiving and building breakthrough companies that will redefine the future of human health.

Before joining Flagship, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and a core member of its Life Science Practice. He advised biotech and biopharma companies, as well as VC funds, on their R&D strategies and new investment opportunities, helping to deliver life-saving innovations to patients.

Tobi was a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at Harvard University, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). During this time, he conducted research on the epigenetic regulation of cancer and neurological disorders. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (as part of the MRC LMB), where he used structural biology to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease and protein degradation, authoring numerous publications in journals such as Nature, Cell, Nature Methods, and Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. His work has earned him multiple awards, including the Bayer Pharmaceuticals Award for the best PhD by the German Biochemical Society, the Credit Suisse Empiris Award for outstanding contributions to brain research, and the Jean Corsan Prize by Alzheimer Research UK. During his time in Cambridge, he also helped to build the largest COVID-19 diagnostic testing lab in the UK and was a Fellow of Emmanual College.

Tobi holds a B.Sc. in Biochemistry and a M.Sc. in Molecular Biotechnology from TU Munich, with a year-long research stay at the University of Oxford, where he worked on protein engineering for the development of nanopore DNA sequencing.