President of Imperial Entrepreneurs · Medical Biosciences @ Imperial College London · Analyst at Innovis VC
London · Amsterdam · Warsaw
From the wet lab bench to early-stage venture.
Hela Hałas is a medical biosciences student at Imperial College London and President of Imperial Entrepreneurs. She has kept both ends of that axis live rather than trading one for the other. She splits her time between London, Amsterdam, and Warsaw.
Venture
On the venture side, she is an analyst at Innovis VC, where she sources and diligences early-stage deep tech and biotech, and works on growth at Emerald. She has advised on global market entry as a strategy consultant with London Healthcare Insights and on go-to-market with Align. She and Ryaan Sultan are the Presidents of Imperial Entrepreneurs, which they run together; alongside that she founded Imperial Ageing & Longevity — a new Imperial society for the biology of ageing — and is a Night Officer at Night Office and a Campus Leader at Notion.
Research
Her research interest is increasingly in computational neurobiology, and she is now starting a new project in the space — the intersection she finds most compelling. The project sits in the Matthews Lab at the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at Imperial, a group working on selective neuronal vulnerability and genetic risk in Alzheimer's disease. She works under Dr Michael Lattke day to day, with Prof Paul Matthews overseeing the scope of the project.
It builds on a wet-lab background in vascular and cancer cell biology: she has investigated endothelial inflammation in atherosclerosis, using CRISPR-Cas9 knockdown to probe the role of TRAF4 in the NF-κB pathway, and worked on sucralose-induced apoptosis in colorectal cancer cells. Her toolkit spans CRISPR-Cas9, qRT-PCR, Western blotting, flow cytometry and mammalian cell culture, alongside Python, R and MATLAB — the same bench fluency she brings to biotech diligence.
Music
Away from science and venture she is a jazz pianist and composer: a Berklee-trained musician who led a 20-piece ensemble and, for her IB extended essay, analysed the physics of electric-guitar pickups with a Fourier transform she coded herself in MATLAB. The science-and-arts combination is long-standing, not incidental.