What motivated you to study science at school? The first thing to say, is that I went to a French-speaking school in London and one of the great things about a French education is that you don’t have to specialise. Even though I did the Scientific Baccalaureate, it included things like history, Spanish, Latin and sport. I pretty much loved it all.
Having said that, from the age of three, I wanted to be a vet. My choices at school were determined by what I thought was my calling.
But you didn’t end up a vet. What happened? I came to Cambridge to study veterinary medicine and loved the pre-clinical course which mixed vets in with medics. To my surprise, I ended up enjoying human more than the animal medicine.
In my third year, I specialised in neuroscience and discovered a passion for it. Then, in the fourth year, when it was time to really embrace the clinical side of being vet, I realised that while I still loved animals, I loved research more.
Coming to terms with the fact that I didn’t want to be a vet any more was not easy. But my college (Fitzwilliam) was hugely supportive and helped me find a way to do a PhD, studying neurodegeneration.
I was lucky enough to get a joint scholarship from Gates Cambridge and the Medical Research Council’s Doctoral Training Programme.
After your PhD, you joined Altos. What was that like? Perfect timing! For my PhD, although it was on neurodegeneration, I was studying the behaviour of stem cells which doesn’t necessarily help us understand what happens as we age.
Altos had just set up in Cambridge and was interested in addressing age-related disease using a new model: bring in a lot of academics, give them big budgets, take away the need to publish scientific papers and see if we can do discovery science better.
It felt very exciting and was a huge learning curve. I loved that there were all these great minds from different disciplines and there were no restrictions on who you could talk to and collaborate with.
Although we were working with comparatively large budgets, it came with a clear focus on both outcomes and pace.
It was also where I met my brilliant co-founder, Professor Kevin Chalut.
Was it always an ambition to be a company founder? To be honest, I’m not sure I knew what an entrepreneur was until I came to Cambridge – and, of course, for all those years I was harbouring dreams of becoming a vet.
But from a very young age, I was definitely someone who liked to take charge of teams and projects. The University also really shaped me and my personality. You can join all these amazing societies and clubs which give you a sense of belonging and, from that, the confidence to try new things.
The reason I made the leap to become a founder was a sense that ‘if no-one else is going to do this, I better had’.
