Mehak Mumtaz grew up in Pakistan and decided to study biochemistry when she saw her brother suffering from an unknown learning disability. Her parents, both medical doctors, could not get an accurate diagnosis for their son.  In her search to understand the molecular mechanisms behind diseases, she applied to study at the University of Oxford. In 2008, she was granted the Reach Oxford Scholarship and graduated with a master’s in biochemistry in 2012. In 2015, the St Hilda’s alumna worked as an undergraduate tutor at Oxford while completing a PhD in pathology, specializing in oncology and cancer biology.In 2018, she worked on a rare cancer project as EIT Health Business Innovation fellow for a year. She left academia and joined a three-month bioentrepreneur bootcamp in Munich and a one-month Lev8 Woman Program at her alma mater’s Oxford Foundry. She joined EY-Parthenon in London as a strategy consultant in April 2019.In 2019, Mumtaz also met the iLoF co-founding team at the EIT Health Wild Card venture-building program. iLoF is a medtech startup that focuses on personalized medicine through the use of AI and photonics to create optical fingerprints in a cloud-based library to gather and manages disease biomarkers and biological profiles.She joined iLoF as COO and co-founder in December 2019 and left her full-time consultancy role at EY in March 2020.