Our Team
Our company is led by a team of executives who collectively bring decades of experience from leading pharmaceutical and life sciences companies and academia and deep experience in generative biology and computational sciences. Our Chief Executive Officer, Michael Nally, M.B.A., joined us in 2021 after an 18-year career at Merck & Co., Inc. (“Merck”), where he served as Chief Marketing Officer overseeing global strategy for a $40 billion portfolio and as President of Global Vaccines. Our Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Gevorg Grigoryan, Ph.D., is a leading protein scientist who drives the development of our Generate Platform and has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in journals including Nature, Science and PNAS. Our President and Chief Financial Officer, Dr. Jason Silvers, M.D., J.D., brings more than 20 years of finance experience, previously serving as a Partner at Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, where he advised on more than $400 billion in global transactions and where he most recently co-led the EMEA healthcare investment banking group.
Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Aarif Khakoo, M.D., M.B.A., is a physician-scientist with extensive experience in drug discovery and development. Previously the Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research and Development at Scribe Therapeutics, Inc., he has also held senior R&D leadership roles at Calico Life Sciences LLC and Amgen, where he advanced multiple programs into the clinic and oversaw translational medicine and early clinical development across multiple therapeutic areas. Dr. Laurie Lee, M.D., our Chief Medical Officer for Immunology & Inflammation, leads late-stage clinical development across our immunology portfolio and previously held senior R&D roles at CSL Behring LLC and GSK plc, where she led development of the Trelegy Ellipta asthma program from Phase 2 through global regulatory submissions that led to approval. Dr. Dinesh de Alwis, Ph.D., our Senior Vice President and Head of Clinical Drug Development, is an accomplished drug developer with more than 25 years of industry experience, including a decade at Merck contributing to the development of pembrolizumab.
Beyond our exceptional leadership team, we have assembled a multi-disciplinary team with deep scientific, clinical, technological, and operational expertise across biotechnology, machine learning and drug discovery and development. In this regard, as of December 31, 2025, we employed 138 M.D.s and Ph.D.s with advanced degrees and experience across multiple therapeutic areas and in fields such as biologic engineering, biochemistry, biomedical engineering, biophysics, biostatistics, chemistry, physics, computer science and PK/PD.
Our Beginnings: Generate and Flagship Pioneering
Flagship Pioneering founded Generate in 2018 as Flagship VL56, Inc., working together with Dr. Gevorg Grigoryan, Ph.D., our founding Chief Technology Officer. In 2019, Flagship VL56, Inc. was combined with complementary generative biology explorations from another Flagship company, Flagship VL57, Inc. Flagship Pioneering invents and builds platform companies, each with the potential for multiple products that transform human health, sustainability and beyond. Generate's founding team is the Flagship Pioneering origination team led by co-founders Dr. Noubar B. Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flagship Pioneering, Dr. Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Ph.D., Dr. Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., Dr. Molly Gibson, Ph.D., other scientists at Flagship Pioneering, and Dr. Grigoryan.
Generate was based on an exploration of the following question: What if we could generate novel protein therapeutics using generative AI tools, without having to discover them through trial and error? The team set out to explore whether advances in generative AI, large-scale protein sequence and structural data, and high-dimensional modeling could unlock a systematic, AI-first approach to creating new therapeutic proteins.
Recognizing the deep scientific synergy between Flagship Pioneering’s data-driven exploration and Dr. Grigoryan’s pioneering insights into the learnable, recurring structural patterns that govern how proteins fold and function, Flagship Pioneering brought these efforts together to launch the world’s first generative biology platform capable of learning the underlying rules of protein function and generating novel therapeutic candidates on demand. Since our inception, we have continued to build on this foundation, advancing our platform, expanding our discovery and development capabilities, and assembling a leadership team committed to translating this new approach into transformative medicines for patients.