photo illustration by maclean’s, photo courtesy of neil mitra

I Started a Biomedical Technology Company and Won an $80,000 Scholarship

How this student won UBC’s Presidential Scholars Award

by neil mitra

April 14, 2026

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University of British Columbia, biomedical engineering
UBC Presidential Scholars Award
$80,000

When I was in Grade 9, a close aunt of mine died from a sudden heart attack, which got me interested in how heart attacks are detected. Around the same time, I wanted to submit a project to the Canada-Wide Science Fair. I compiled a list of materials and equipment I would need to get the project started and cold-emailed professors at the University of Waterloo, which led to a volunteer research assistant position in a biology lab. For the first few months, I played around with the different instruments and got familiar with how everything worked, while learning from the professor who ran the lab.

After about a year, I started to run my own experiments. I wanted to develop a new method to extract protein from blood more quickly, which would lead to earlier warnings of heart attacks in blood tests. I spent Grade 10 working on that project and, in Grade 11, I presented it at the 2021 Canada-Wide Science Fair, where I won a gold medal.

When it came time for me to apply to university, I focused on schools that would support my entrepreneurial goals. I applied to several biomedical engineering programs in Canada, including ones at Waterloo, McMaster, Queen’s, Western and the University of British Columbia. I also applied to a couple of schools in the U.S. and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The UBC application requires students to fill out a personal profile, which has several short-answer questions. I wrote about my interest in biomedical technologies and my research into heart-attack detection. When I was filling out my application, I saw that I could request to be considered for UBC’s Presidential Scholars Award, worth up to $80,000, because I was applying by the early December deadline.

I got a call from UBC in March as I was headed to the airport for a March break trip to the Netherlands. They told me I had been selected as a presidential scholar, and I made my decision to attend UBC shortly after that. The scholarship was a big factor, but UBC’s innovation hub and strong support for entrepreneurship were the factors that really drew me to the school. I started my company, Mitra Biotechnologies, in my first year and raised a quarter of a million in funding from venture capital. Now in my fourth year, we’ve built a prototype for the heart-attack detection test and are working on licensing our product.