With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/950283
40 BCBusiness ApRIL 2018 lIfE SToRY: holly peck is a native Vancouverite whose father is a Chartered Business Valuator and whose mother, now retired, was Lululemon Athletica Inc.'s first pR and marketing director. One of her first jobs was helping her mom at Lululemon, and she used to fold clothes with JJ Wilson, son of founder Dennis (Chip) Wilson. "Very Vancouver through and through," she acknowledges. peck, who attended Little Flower Academy for high school, enrolled in princeton University as a math and economics major but graduated in 2012 with a BA in anthropology. A highlight of her studies was participating in an archaeological dig of a Neanderthal butchering site in France one summer, unearthing denticulated hand axes created by entities "on the fringes of humanness." Asking questions about what makes us human led to her current role developing cognitive architectural systems for in- house humanoid robots at Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI. After completing a web development program at the Flatiron School in New York City in 2016, peck became frustrated with the male-dominated engineering meetup scene back home. In January 2017, she launched a Vancouver chapter of Women Who Code. Based in San Francisco, WWCode is a global non-profit that supports women in the tech industry. peck invited Suzanne gildert, co-founder and then chief science officer of Kindred, to speak at the Vancouver chapter of WWCode, and wound up being hired as an artificial intelligence engineer. When Sanctuary was spun out of Kindred this January, peck became employee one. THE boTToM lINE: In its first year, the Vancouver chapter of Women Who Code grew to some 1,500 members. –F.S. h o L LY P e C k Founder woMen who coDe inc., VancouVer Research scientist sanctuary ai age: 27 lIfE SToRY: Tamer mohamed faced a tough choice in 2014. An electrical and computer engineer- ing phD student at UBC, where he had completed a master's degree in electrical and biomedical engineering, mohamed was helping refine a system to print living human tissue such as muscle and cartilage. he had also co- founded Aspect Biosystems, a novel 3D bio-printing company, in 2013, and was finding himself pulled in two directions. "I had to make a big decision about whether to continue on with my phD or to focus on commercializing our technology," says Vancouver-born mohamed, who began as Aspect's CTO before becoming chief executive in 2016. his engineer father and nutrition- ist mother, who emigrated from Egypt to B.C. in the 1970s, weren't thrilled when he put his academic career on hold. "I still promise my mom I'll go back and finish my phD," mohamed says with a laugh. "No matter how big Aspect gets, I think it's always going to be a question on their minds." Vancouver-based Aspect aims to create human tissue on demand for transplant. Although that goal is still a few years away, the company has partnered with pharmaceuticals and biotechnology firms—including Johnson & Johnson, with which it's working on printing knee cartilage that could offer a fix for injuries. Other appli- cations include testing pharmaceuticals on tissue before clinical trials, where about 90 percent of drugs currently fail. Another revenue stream is in academic research, where Aspect retains the rights to any tissues developed using its platform. THE boTToM lINE: Since mohamed took over as CEO, Aspect has secured major funding, boosted revenue by some 1,500 percent and expanded its staff from eight to more than 20. Among the company's honours: Canada's most promising startup from non-profit metabridge in 2017, one of the country's 20 most innovative tech startups from the Canadian Innovation Exchange that year and a 2015 Startup Canada Award for Innovation. –J.W. tA m e R m o h A m e D Co-founder, president and CEO asPect biosysteMs ltD. age: 29