Yiqun Bai

Yiqun joined Flagship Pioneering as a senior associate in 2017. She focuses on evaluating investment opportunities, working with portfolio companies in the enterprise, and creating new startups.

Before joining Flagship, Yiqun worked in the Boston office of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, leading projects in strategy, scenario planning, strategic marketing and due diligence. Yiqun’s projects touched a variety of industries, including medical devices, sustainable energy, agriculture chemicals, basic chemicals and specialty chemicals. While at Roland Berger, Yiqun was selected for the Challenge Club, the company’s international leadership development program for global top performers. Yiqun has also worked for CombinatorRx, where she performed high-throughput experiments and data analysis on the synergistic effects of combination drug therapies.

Yiqun received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the lab of Nicholas L. Abbott at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied the intermolecular interactions of liquid crystals at biomolecular interfaces. Yiqun was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and was selected to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 2009.

She also holds a B.S. in chemical-biological engineering from MIT. Her undergraduate research was conducted in the lab of Christine Ortiz and focused on developing novel material and mechanical designs for the endotracheal tube. In addition to research, Yiqun was involved in various education and sustainable development initiatives in China. She implemented a pilot project for MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative in Qinghai University, teaching a biological engineering course and leading local communication. She also initiated a project for MIT’s D-lab initiative based on exploring sustainable development opportunities in high-altitude regions of China’s western provinces and produced a research report on distance education in China’s rural areas for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Beijing.