The Lists
Life Story: One year into a business degree at the University of Calgary, Kerryn Cooper felt uninspired. “I was getting really discouraged,” the South African–born entrepreneur recalls. “It was dry; I wanted to be more creative.” At her mother’s suggestion, Cooper, who had immigrated to Victoria with her family at...
Life Story: Felix Böck, who hails from a tiny alpine village in southern Germany, was headed for a career in carpentry after leaving school in Grade 9 to study the trade. But Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences, near Munich, gave him the chance to earn a degree in wood technology...
Life Story: Dara Djafarian was accepted to medical school but opted for business instead. “As much as I love medicine, I always enjoyed the opportunity to bring businesses and ideas to light and make them commercially viable and real and interesting and applicable to society,” he explains. When Djafarian was...
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...
Life Story: Tamer Mohamed faced a tough choice in 2014. An electrical and computer engineering 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...
Life Story: “Looking back on it, I know my childhood was a bit different than most people’s,” says Brandon Morrison, who grew up in Halifax and graduated from St. Mary’s University with a BA in philosophy in 2011. From a young age, he and his older sister, Kaleena, helped out...
Life Story: Making a new friend put student Naitik Mehta on a path to social entrepreneurship. Mehta, who grew up with a single mom in Pune, India, arrived in Vancouver just two years ago for a BA in interaction design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He met...
Life Story: Sanctuary AI was spun off from robot developer Kindred Systems Inc.’s artificial general intelligence division in January. “The day-to-day goals for me are aligned with our previous work,” Olivia Norton observes. “We continue to tackle the same hard problem, with a mandate to create synthetic humans that are...
Life Story: Vancouver’s Werklab is technically a coworking space, but Christina Disler doesn’t think that term suffices. “Our business is our community,” Disler says, describing a model in which potential users must apply to be a member of the Werklab family. “We won’t sell out and do the daily drop-in...
Life Story: Mohammad Akhlaghi has three birthdays, as he says is custom in his native Iran: the day he was born; the day six months previous his engineer father and dentistry professor mother moved his birthday to so he could start school a year early; and the day in the...