Since 2011, he has been a partner at Flagship Pioneering, where he helped create multiple companies including Cygnal, Codiak, Rubius, and Seres. Prior to Flagship, Avak was VP of Business Development at Helicos BioSciences. Avak earned his PhD and BSc in Biochemistry from McGill University.

The study of biology is in the midst of a quiet revolution. What was once a solo, analog endeavor at the lab bench is transforming into one of interdisciplinary teams working across the physical and in silico worlds, generating digital data at scale. This change is driven by the growing appreciation that biology is highly complex and that our simplistic, reductionist approaches are no longer producing medicines. Nevertheless, in this new regime of ‘big science’, experimental design, execution and interpretation are beginning to overwhelm the computational limits of the human brain, risking a reversion to oversimplification, reductionism and cognitive bias. With the advent of machine learning technologies and algorithms, these limitations can be lifted, and we can redesign the traditional research paradigm in biology. In this talk, we will explore a few of the ways Flagship Pioneering is rethinking the pursuit of biological questions by melding computation, technology and biology. We are currently forming a number of our biotechnology startups with this philosophy from the ground up - organizing their teams, platforms and workstreams in novel ways in order to garner biological insights and develop therapeutic innovations that were heretofore impossible. We are tackling and solving questions of protein folding and design, cellular states and their transitions, and the prediction of drug action, all in the pursuit of generating new drugs to treat disease and promote healthy aging.