Sabrina Yang

Sabrina Yang is a senior principal at Flagship Pioneering. She joined Flagship in 2017 and works as part of a team of entrepreneurial scientists to conceive, create, resource and develop Flagship’s first-in-category platform companies. She currently serves as co-founder and chief innovation officer of Empress Therapeutics.

Prior to joining Flagship, Sabrina was a postdoctoral researcher and an NSF-funded translational fellow at MIT, where she worked with MIT’s venture mentoring service team to bring her academic research from the bench to commercialization.

During her Ph.D., Sabrina worked in the lab of Darrell Irvine and developed a T-cell targeting, cell membrane-penetrating nanoparticle technology to overcome tumor-mediated immunosuppression and improve cancer vaccine outcomes. Her graduate work resulted in publication in multiple peer-reviewed journals 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.