Christopher Austin serves as the CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering and is the founding CEO of Vesalius Therapeutics, a flagship franchise company focused on innovative treatments for common diseases. With a diverse background bridging biopharmaceuticals, academia, and government, Chris has played a vital role in advancing translational science and drug development. Notably, he founded and directed the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the NIH for nearly a decade, where he revolutionized therapeutic development through inventive drug screening, disease modeling, and clinical trial enhancements. Prior to NCATS, Chris directed translational scientific and technology initiatives at the National Human Genome Research Institute for 10 years. He started his career as a physician researcher at Merck where he focused on genome-based discovery of novel targets and drugs in neuropsychiatric diseases. Chris received his A.B. in biology from Princeton and M.D. from Harvard Medical School and completed a research fellowship in genetics at Harvard.