When I joined the Oxford MBA, I wasn’t quite sure what my next steps were. I had been working as a medical doctor in emergency departments across South Africa, during the height of Covid-19, a time when the strain on our already-scarce health resources was intense. I saw firsthand how centralized models of care were struggling to meet the needs of people. I felt limited by my two hands, and by the lack of tools we had to monitor patients.
It became clear to me that this wasn’t a problem a single person, or profession, could solve. It was going to take collaboration across disciplines, across industries. I needed to step outside the silo of clinical medicine, and the MBA at Oxford felt like the right next step.
Before day one, Oxford started shaping my path. I met Vicki in line at Najar’s, the food truck famous among students. We quickly realized we shared more than hunger; we shared a vision. A belief that the future of health would be proactive, continuous, and deeply human-centered. The rest, as they say, is history. We’ve now been building together for almost three years, combining her experience as an engineer at Apple with my healthcare experience, to create Lume Health.
At Oxford, we became obsessed with the science of circadian rhythms - how nearly every cell in the human body keeps time, and how the breakdown of those rhythms contributes to burnout, insomnia, depression, and chronic disease. But there was a gap: we had no practical way to measure these rhythms. The idea for Lume was born.
The most important health information is molecular and accessible only through lab-based tests, but what if we could measure these molecules through sweat, non-invasively and continuously? Most people thought it was impossible. But we kept coming back to the same thought, if we could make it work, it could fundamentally change the way people manage their health.
What started as a few slides for the Entrepreneurship Project, led by Oxford Saïd Entrepreneurship Centre, turned into late nights prototyping, chasing grants, and testing early versions of the sensor in garages and hypotheses in borrowed labs. Now we are in San Francisco, with a world-class research and development team, and early funding from forward-looking investors who share our belief in what is possible.
Looking back, Oxford was the inflection point. The Oxford Saïd community, faculty, peers, and mentors, gave us the clarity, challenge, and courage we needed. And it never stopped. Several Oxonians are still a part of our journey, from strategic advisors to early team members and investors.
The programme showed that impact and commercial success are not at odds. If you’re solving a meaningful problem in a scalable way, they become one and the same. That’s what we’re proving with Lume Health.
Find out more about the Oxford MBA.
