Meet Rachade Hmamouchi: Founder of IASO Genetics

Rachade Hmamouchi is an entrepreneur, data scientist and a STEMinist. She is the founder of IASO Genetics and the co-founder of Manifeste des femmes en tech. Hmamouchi discusses choosing a major, transitioning from academia to industry, the value of internships as well as what it is like to be a woman in STEM.

Rachade Hmamouchi, Founder of IASO Genetics.

Tell me a little bit about yourself?

My name is Rachade Hmamouchi, I’m the founder of IASO Genetics. IASO Genetics is the intelligent and wellness space. We want to help people with nutrition, by combining existing science and technologies that we have. So, based on your genetics, we provide recommendations on natural products and some recipes. We are mainly trying to help you choose the right foods that will impact your life based on what we know.

That’s really cool! What exactly did you study?

I studied bioinformatics, so it’s data science for biology and health in general. I did my bachelors in Montreal and my master's degree in Geneva [Switzerland]. I worked for universities and biotech's, and now I’m also a program manager at McGill for the genome center, where I’m in charge of the workshops.

What made you want to pursue this field (bioinformatics)?

I’ve always loved science. When I was deciding I literally read every name of every bachelor's degree that existed at every university in Montreal. And I thought “bioinformatics, that is cool!”. I liked the health and the coding programming part, so it was perfect for me.

When did you switch from academia to being a founder?

Two or three years ago, I did an incubator for startups. I think, as a scientist, it’s really really helpful to be apart of an incubator because you know your science, you know your product, you know what’s valuable, and it is really simple to catch on to the business side of everything!

What was it like being apart of an incubator?

It was for 8 months. Once you apply you must get your idea validated. And really you learn everything about the business. There are countless workshops and exercises. You also have access to mentors and you develop your own team.

Hmamouchi went on to discuss how she believes the internship she had in Geneva was an incredibly valuable experience which helped ease her transition from academia to industry. She explains that “this kind of experience is valuable because you’ve already started working!”.

So you recommend doing an internship?

Yeah, if you want to go into industry, starting early, I think is important. I did my first internship in the first year of my bachelors. I found a lab that was interesting and I just wanted to see how things worked. I think as a student, you need to understand that it doesn’t cost them anything for you to come and see say their laboratory. So trying to reach out to people is important.

If you are going into tech, one thing that helped me a lot was going to hackathons. Even if you don’t code, you can just show up and ask people if you can watch them code. A lot of them remember what it was like learning to code and are more than happy to help.

That’s all the questions I have. Thank you so much!