Hot on the heels of winning the inaugural St Edmund’s College Entrepreneurs competition in April for which he received a coveted and valuable place on the Judge Business School’s Accelerate Cambridge Programme, PhD student Patrick Short has gone on to win a top £5k prize from CUE, the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs Society.

Patrick is a co-founder of heterogeneous, a start-up aimed at bringing people closer to the research process in genetics and medicine while providing scientists with access to much richer and more dynamic data. Millions of genomes have now been sequenced worldwide, but most of this data is frozen in time and one-dimensional. The heterogeneous platform is being built to connect individuals to institutions, and provides access to rich datasets at a fraction of the cost while empowering individuals to decide how to share their data.

Patrick is a PhD student on the Mathematical Genomics and Medicine programme and is researching the genetic causes of severe developmental disorders with Matt Hurles at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Outside of research, Patrick has a number of interests including scientists’ role in shaping public policy and science communication.