Christopher Austin is a CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge MA. In that role, he serves as CEO of one of Flagship’s franchise companies and advises on the operation and creation of other Flagship entities. Before joining Flagship in 2021 Dr. Austin served for almost a decade as the founding director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the NIH where he formulated the strategic vision and scientific directions of the new center and led its efforts in developing demonstrating and disseminating scientific and operational advances across the spectrum of translational science to get more treatments to more patients more quickly from target validation to preclinical therapeutic development to clinical trials to community health implementation. Before NCATS Austin founded and directed a number of scientific and technology initiatives at the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH to derive biological insights and therapeutic potential from the human genome. Austin came to NIH in 2002 from Merck where his work focused on the genome-based discovery of novel targets and drugs with a particular focus on common complex neuropsychiatric diseases. He received his A.B. in biology from Princeton and M.D. from Harvard Medical School did clinical training in internal medicine and neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and completed a research fellowship in genetics at Harvard.