Senior Research Associate, Formulations

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

Flagship Pioneering is a platform innovation company that invents and builds companies that change the world. We bring together the greatest scientific minds with entrepreneurial company builders and assemble the capital to allow them to take courageous leaps. Those big leaps in human health, sustainability and beyond exponentially accelerate scientific progress in areas ranging from disease detection and treatment and nature-positive agriculture to novel applications of AI that are driving the creation of new technologies.   

What sets Flagship apart is our ability to advance science and technology by uniting innovation, company creation, and capital investment under one roof in a way that is largely without precedent. Our scientific founders, entrepreneurial leaders, and professional capital managers are each aligned around an institutionalized process that enables us to innovate and transform for the benefit of people and planet.   

Many of the companies Flagship has founded have addressed humanity’s most urgent challenges: vaccinating billions of people against COVID-19, curing intractable diseases, improving human health, preempting illness, and feeding the world by improving the resiliency and sustainability of agriculture.  

Flagship has been recognized twice on FORTUNE’s “Change the World” list, an annual ranking of companies that have made a positive social and environmental impact through activities that are part of their core business strategies and has been twice named to Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. 

THE ROLE

This role will be a foundational hire supporting our formulation and product development efforts, with a primary focus on the development, screening, and optimization of dried powder formulations. The individual will play a critical hands-on role in executing formulation strategies using techniques such as lyophilization and spray drying, while contributing experimental rigor, physical insight, and data-driven decision-making to early-stage platform development.

The Senior Research Associate will work closely with process development partners to produce robust, stable, and scalable powders. In addition to executing experiments, this role will contribute to experimental design, data interpretation, and the establishment of best practices for formulation screening, characterization, and documentation in a fast-moving, early-stage environment.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design, execute, and optimize dried powder formulations using lyophilization and spray drying, with a focus on stability, reproducibility, and performance across multiple formulation variables;
• Execute formulation screening efforts using statistically grounded experimental designs (e.g., DoEs), including selection of factors, responses, and experimental conditions, and translate results into actionable next steps;
• Evaluate the impact of excipients, processing conditions, and storage environments on material stability, integrity, and functionality, including under accelerated or stress conditions;
• Characterize dried powder products using appropriate analytical and physical methods (e.g., particle size and morphology, thermal analysis, moisture content, bulk properties) to inform formulation and process decisions;
• Support process development and scale-awareness by documenting critical parameters, identifying sources of variability, and generating data relevant to future scale-up, tech transfer, or external partnerships;
• Maintain clear, rigorous experimental documentation and generate high-quality summaries, figures, and datasets suitable for internal decision-making, patent disclosures, and external communication;
• Contribute to the establishment of long-term formulation workflows, best practices, and standards that support platform development in a small, highly collaborative team.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE & QUALIFICATIONS 

• Bachelor’s degree (with 5-7 years of relevant research experience) or Master’s degree (with 3-5 years of relevant research experience) in chemistry, chemical engineering, pharmaceutical sciences, materials science, biotechnology, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience with drying-based formulation techniques, including lyophilization and/or spray drying, and an understanding of how process parameters influence solid-state properties;
• Strong grounding in physical chemistry or materials science principles relevant to dried systems, including glass transition behavior, crystallinity, moisture interactions, and excipient effects;
• Experience designing and executing statistically informed experiments (e.g., DoEs), with the ability to interpret interaction effects and use data to guide experimental iterati