Nicholas Franklin

Nicholas Franklin joined Flagship Pioneering in 2023 as a Senior Machine Learning Scientist for Pioneering Intelligence, where he works on fundamental Machine Learning and AI research, supporting venture creation efforts through the development of novel machine learning methods and techniques.

Nicholas brings expertise in generative methods and reinforcement learning. He was trained as a theoretical neuroscientist, developing theoretical accounts of cognition and the brain from statistical theory and machine learning. His research as a graduate student at Brown focused on the basal ganglia and reinforcement learning. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, his research bridged models of human cognition and generative methods in ML. Prior to joining Flagship, Nicholas worked at Hyperscience, a business-automation startup, developing computer vision and natural language processing models for enterprise customers. 

Nicholas received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at Brown University. He also holds a B.S in biology and a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin.