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QcSE Graduate

Participant

Eisha Ahmed

Background

Immunology, Computer Sciences, Math

Program

Connecting biological sciences, computer science, and math to solve data analytics limitations.

Eisha Ahmed is a Ph.D. candidate in science with a personal mission to facilitate communication and exchange across multiple disciplines of science, particularly between biological sciences, computer science, and mathematics.

Data analytics hasn’t kept pace with the explosion of data in biomedical and clinical research, resulting in the loss of valuable R&D time, money, and research potential. Researchers face disparate biological datasets across multiple data silos, and analytics are disconnected from data storage. Most importantly, there is a lack of technical and computational expertise currently needed to make the most of the available data. Eisha became increasingly interested in how to leverage her interdisciplinary scientific background to solve this issue and build a company from an idea.

The Solution

Eisha is developing a data analytics platform specifically built for the biomedical and clinical sciences, with clinician-scientists, biomedical researchers, graduate students, and postdocs as the initial market.

This software-based solution will allow researchers to integrate and analyze biomedical data with a few clicks, increasing the accessibility of more advanced analytics techniques and algorithms to get more out of their data without sacrificing simplicity.

The Journey

“QcSE helped me to transform a vague idea into a focused business plan that I can go forward with.” 

The Quebec Scientific Entrepreneurship program gave Eisha the critical foundation and experience to access customers to better formulate an idea for a startup. She benefited from being able to interact with many other graduate students and researchers interested in entrepreneurship and enjoyed the fact it was online, which gave her flexibility to better manage her responsibilities as a graduate student, while still having occasional opportunities to have in-person activities and events

When Eisha initially began the QcSE program, she wanted to solve much broader challenges in the data analytics space, tackling multiple markets simultaneously. Through this program, she learned the importance of defining an initial target market to business strategy and feasible execution.

Ideas are numerous; everyone can have an idea for a business – the real value comes from putting in the work and having the skills and knowledge to develop a feasible plan. Conducting customer interviews played a crucial role in refining Eisha’s initial idea, and challenging her assumptions about the problem. She discovered that while data analytics is indeed a significant challenge, data management and organization was an even more pressing problem for potential customers.