Life Illustrated: Armen Mkrtchyan

I grew up in a small town in Armenia, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and amidst war, which left the country without electricity and few resources. However, my childhood was a happy one spent with my friends and two younger brothers. We would hurry to finish our homework before it got dark so we could play outside together.

On weekends, I would visit my grandparents in the countryside where they raised sheep, cows, and pigs, as well as tended a small vineyard. At seven years old, I was in charge of taking the cows out all day. This was a formative time spent with my grandpa who only had middle school level education but was one of the smartest people I knew. He could recite Shakespeare and I would help him tinker and build things that weren’t readily available like bicycles.

My parents were both engineers and drove me to be the best academically. At 14, I was able to attend a prestigious private high school in the capital city of Yerevan, focusing on technical studies and challenging my academic abilities. Because I lived on my own in a small apartment, visiting my family on weekends, my fellow students and I formed very close bonds.

After high school, I was accepted to Yerevan State University, where I had an opportunity through the U.S. State Department to join an exchange program in North Dakota. At 19, I left Armenia for the first time, coming to the U.S. where I eventually stayed to finish my degrees in electrical engineering, math, and physics. During that time, I got to experience many firsts including ice skating for the first time. To this day, North Dakota is one of the most hospitable places I’ve ever been.

My early interest in drone technology led me to pursue my Master's and Doctorate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), focusing on autonomous vehicles and sparking my initial interest in AI. Shortly after graduation in North Dakota, I drove for over two days from Grand Forks, ND, to make my way to Cambridge, MA.

At MIT, I took a class at the business school on entrepreneurship, which was taught by Flagship CEO and Founder Noubar Afeyan. The assignment was to devise our own company, and I initially developed a concept around drones for military applications. Noubar encouraged me to instead consider an application more beneficial for humanity. Taking his advice, I developed a drone to evaluate soil health, testing the technology over the MIT football field.

Upon earning my PhD, I briefly returned to Armenia to teach computer science. However, an opportunity at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles altered my course. As a consultant, I applied my expertise in AI to real-world applications focusing on autonomous vehicles and semiconductors, which kept me busy traveling all over the U.S. and internationally to meet a diversity of clients.

I always kept in touch with Noubar after we met at MIT, but never saw a place for myself at Flagship. During the pandemic, Noubar invited me to join Flagship, which was an exciting opportunity to learn from someone who I looked up to, but it was a hard transition. Everyone was speaking a language very foreign to me — biology — but Noubar advised me to take the leap and keep my gaze fixed forward.

At Flagship, I initially worked to support several of our established and burgeoning companies on their computational and modeling work, which eventually grew into the Pioneering Intelligence (PI) initiative. As Head of PI, I lead a team pioneering advances in machine intelligence, including generative models, to augment the capabilities of Flagship companies, amplify our process of creating breakthrough innovations, and originate new platform companies built on AI advances.

Life Illustrated: Armen Mkrtchyan

An unexpected path to Flagship