Trenton Piepergerdes

Trenton Piepergerdes joined Flagship Pioneering as an Associate with Pioneering Medicines in 2023 after completing the Flagship Fellowship in 2022. At Pioneering Medicines, Trenton works as part of a team drawing on deep understanding of disease biology to create transformational medicines leveraging Flagship’s portfolio of bioplatforms.

Trenton received an MS and PhD in Bioengineering from Rice University. His MS work was at the interface of mammalian synthetic biology and tissue engineering, where he focused on the implementation of optogenetic transcriptional control circuits to guide osteogenic differentiation for bone regenerative therapies. During his PhD he developed high throughput methods for gene circuit design and deployment, generating novel methods for plasmid library creation and assessment, as well as a novel method for pooled single cell RNA sequencing to directly assess circuit features and their effects on stem cell differentiation. He received the Student Achievement award from the Rice Bioengineering Department for his thesis work and advocacy for graduate student well-being and LGBTQIA+ representation in higher education.

He received his B.E. in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University where he researched the role of caspases across breast cancers. He also performed bone tissue engineering research at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.