Daniel Acker is Chief Innovation Officer and a co-founder at Metaphore, as well as a Principal at Flagship Pioneering. He works in venture creation at the intersection of computational and experimental biology and has co-founded several start-ups within the Flagship ecosystem including Apriori Bio. Prior to joining Flagship, Daniel worked as a data scientist at Repertoire Immune Medicines where he led a modeling group and designed statistical methods and data pipelines to decode T cell receptor specificities. He also completed fellowships with Insight Data Science and NSF I-Corps. Daniel earned a PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis University in the laboratory of Suzanne Paradis, where he studied structural synaptic plasticity, using molecular biology and electrophysiology to develop a novel therapeutic approach for epilepsy and using computational modeling to explore the effects of synaptic rewiring on memory.