Olivia Viessmann

Olivia Viessmann joined Flagship Pioneering in 2021 as a Senior Machine Learning Scientist on the Pioneering Intelligence team. She works on fundamental Machine Learning research and prototypes next generation ML methods to augment Flagship’s venture creation. Her expertise spans deep learning methods for natural language processing, image processing and computer vision, with a focus on biotech applications.

Olivia has a strong background in medical image processing, neuroimaging and computer vision as a former developer of functional MRI methods and contributor to the FreeSurfer brain imaging software. She patented her deep learning work on fMRI bias removal and co-authored more than 10 peer-reviewed articles and numerous conference papers. She received the Summa Cum Laude Award of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine twice.

Prior to joining Flagship, Olivia was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and served as an editor to Elsevier’s open data journal “Data in Brief”. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Neuroscience from Oxford University as a Marie-Curie Fellow of the European Union. During her doctorate she implemented novel MRI methods to image cerebral small vessel disease, a leading cause of stroke and cognitive decline. She holds an M.Sc. in Physics from Imperial College London and a B.Sc. in Physics from Heidelberg University in Germany.