Alicia Kaestli

Alicia joined Flagship Pioneering in 2021 and works on venture creation at the convergence of machine learning and biology. She partners with entrepreneurial scientists to establish and build revolutionary biotechnology platform companies.

Before joining Flagship, Alicia was a Senior Data Scientist at Amgen. She led teams building machine learning models to improve patient outcomes using a wide variety of datasets, such as clinical trial results and electronic medical records. While at Amgen, Alicia worked with Kári Stefánsson at deCODE Genetics in Iceland to develop algorithms that stratify patient risk using multi-omic datasets. Alicia was part of the Amgen Ventures Operating Team, where she co-led investments and partnerships that deepened Amgen’s drug discovery and biomarker capabilities. Before Amgen, Alicia worked on the Novartis Strategic Venture Capital team to evaluate data-rich biotech startups.

Alicia earned her Ph.D. and M.Sc. at ETH Zurich in Biotechnology as an Excellence Scholar. During graduate school, she collaborated closely with clinicians to design personalized microfluidics-based diagnostic devices for drug repurposing studies on subtypes of acute lymphoblastic leukemia and developed software to measure cardiac arrhythmia on high-density microelectrode arrays. She holds a B.Sc. in Biological Engineering from MIT.