Mariola Szenk

Mariola Szenk, PhD, currently serves as an Investor at BlueYard Capital, focusing on pre-seed and seed stage investments in transformative deep technology companies, particularly in the techbio sector and ventures utilizing AI/ML or physics. Previously, Mariola held the position of Projects Lead in Artificial Intelligence at Flagship Pioneering, where explorations from ideation to prototyping were led, and opportunities at the intersection of artificial intelligence and molecular biology were identified. Prior to that, as Translational Partnerships Lead at nference, partnerships with the Mayo Clinic and pharmaceutical companies were established to drive R&D initiatives. Academic achievements include postdoctoral research at the Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Stony Brook University, supplemented by a Bachelor's degree in Physics and Economics from Macaulay Honors College at The City University of New York. Mariola's early work involved synthetic gene circuit design at MIT and the application of natural language processing for classifying scientific literature at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.