Alumni Spotlights

The Making of a Serial Inventor-Entrepreneur

In November 2014, Flagship Ventures announced Geoffrey von Maltzahn’s third company since joining the firm, his seventh, if you include the four he co-founded as a graduate student in HST’s Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD program. The company, Symbiota, aims to tackle a completely new space for von Maltzahn: agriculture.

As an undergraduate, Maya Barley was studying electrical engineering, but she wanted to be a doctor. And an astronaut. While doing a summer internship at NASA, she happened across HST’s Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD program. “I’d found the magical combination of medical experience and engineering,” she says. “I said, this is it. This, or nothing.”