Dr. Darrell Irvine co-founded Ankyra in 2019, following years of extensive research in the field of biomedical engineering. He is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Additionally, he works as an Associate Director at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and serves on the steering committee of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. His research primarily focuses on the application of engineering tools to new and existing problems in cellular immunology, as well as seeking out the development of novel materials for vaccine administration and drug delivery.

Dr. Irvine has been the recipient of several awards, including a Beckman Young Investigator award, NSF CAREER award, selection for Technology Review’s ‘TR35’, and election as a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Following completion of his PhD, he was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow in immunology at the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. He also holds an Honors Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Pittsburgh and was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow.