Year One

Mimoun Cadosch Delmar grew up in Bogota, Colombia as the eldest son of immigrants. When Mimoun’s dad was thirteen, he started working to help pay his family’s bills and eventually started his own textile company. Mimoun remembers how his father used to pull him out of school for weeks to take him on business trips. He used to sit in all the meetings, go to all of the trade shows, and visit all the booths with his dad. “It made me realize this is what I want to do. I want to build a company. I want to innovate.”

In school, Mimoun studied math and computer science. At some point, Mimoun realized that “science is upstream of everything — our ability to grow the economic pie as a society…and I wanted to create a company to advance the rate of scientific progress.” Although a computer scientist by training, Mimoun was inspired by George Church’s book Regenesis to explore synthetic biology to program life instead of computers.

Mimoun chose to work at the Broad Institute in order to immerse himself in the center of the biotechnology field. “I always thought the way science worked was [by asking] ‘what scientific question can we ask — and how do we build the tools to answer it?’ [But] the way it really worked was, ‘What tools do we have, and what scientific questions do they allow us to ask?’ I realized that tools really drive science.”