Elizabeth O’Day Keeps Finding Room for One More Scientist

Elizabeth O’Day went to talk to high-school students about science and discovered that some of the girls had already decided against it. They thought it was boring. Or difficult. For a college student enjoying her own scientific work, this was a discouraging review of the subject. It was also actionable. O’Day could offer them something they had not yet had: a closer look.

Back at Boston College, she designed Women in Science & Technology. The month-long program brought students from three local high schools onto campus for research activities, lectures, field excursions and time with mentors. A scientific career could become less remote when there was an undergraduate nearby to answer questions. O’Day was still a student herself. Apparently that was enough seniority to start arranging things.

Her later résumé would acquire Cambridge, Harvard and the founder’s title at Olaris. Yet this early episode gives a useful introduction to Elizabeth “Liz” O’Day. She saw people hesitating at the edge of something she valued, then built a way for them to participate. The work involved invitations, schedules and other small, necessary jobs that rarely fit on an inspirational poster.

The visit that became a program

O’Day grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, and studied biochemistry at Boston College. Her undergraduate years combined research with an interest in who felt entitled to attempt it. The girls she met did not need another stranger insisting that science was wonderful. They needed a chance to encounter it with enough time, support and company to form a different opinion.

The program made that encounter possible. Its structure allowed for several ways into the subject: an experiment, a conversation, a visit, a person whose work seemed interesting. The practical advantage of a campus full of scientists was that you could introduce people to them. O’Day took advantage of it.

By 2017, Women in Science & Technology had given more than 600 high-school and college students opportunities to learn about scientific careers. That is a historical participation figure, rather than a running total. It does establish something useful about the original idea: it survived well beyond the student’s own graduation. Other people had found reasons to keep it going.

O’Day also played club rugby at Boston College. There is room in this biography for that detail. The future scientist and founder had interests that did not require a laboratory, and her undergraduate life was wider than its academic prizes. Her way of describing her approach was economical: “When I take on a task,” she said, “I do it full force.”

“When I take on a task, I do it full force.”

Elizabeth O’Day

A scientist, with a clothing label

The academic prizes were substantial. O’Day received Beckman and Goldwater research honors, a Churchill Scholarship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Boston College also awarded her its Rev. Edward H. Finnegan, SJ Award. The sequence took her from an undergraduate science degree to chemistry at Cambridge and doctoral study at Harvard.

Those institutions gave her a sustained education in research. She earned an MPhil in Chemistry at Cambridge, then completed her Harvard doctorate in 2013. At each stage, there were questions that required technical skill and patience. Her eventual move into company building followed years spent learning how to investigate something before claiming to understand it.

She also found a rather different outlet. During graduate school she founded Lizzard Fashion, a clothing venture meant to promote science. Science had acquired a place in the wardrobe. The premise was playful, but it addressed a familiar question for O’Day: how do you make the subject visible to people outside the room where it is usually discussed?

A shirt offers a small, portable answer. It can be bought, worn and noticed without anyone registering for a lecture. The venture put her scientific interests into a product with ordinary customers and ordinary logistical needs. Research remained her central work; clothing provided another way to express an enthusiasm that was proving difficult to confine to the laboratory.

In a 2011 online exchange with school students, she described herself as “A little creative ;)”. She said she would design a T-shirt between experiments. She also liked music in the lab. These details belong to someone enjoying the life she was working hard to enter, and wanting the students asking questions to see some of that enjoyment.

The student-facing exchange was an opportunity to answer curiosity directly. It allowed her to appear as a person with a working day, interests and a sense of humor. For someone trying to imagine a scientific career, that can be a useful addition to the formal description of a degree. The person doing the job makes it easier to picture.

An old computer gets another assignment

Proyecto Chispa expanded her organizing beyond science outreach. The name means Project Spark. The project recycled electronics and used proceeds from the sale of parts to help build computer centers in orphanages. Equipment that one group no longer needed could contribute to another group’s access to technology.

There is a pleasing practical intelligence in that arrangement. The starting material was already available. The challenge was to connect collection and recycling with an educational purpose. An unwanted device could be the beginning of a process involving volunteers, usable resources and a destination. Each connection had to be made by someone.

O’Day’s own project account describes recruiting ten volunteers and coordinating a recycling effort across multiple cities. It records more than a metric ton of electronics collected and more than 100 computers sent to orphanages. These are reported project results. They give the idea some physical dimensions: people recruited, material moved, computers delivered.

In June 2015, Boston recognized O’Day as a Greenovate Champion. The award placed her alongside people and organizations working on the city’s sustainability efforts. Her contribution had an educational destination as well as a recycling mechanism. A computer’s usefulness need not end when its first owner has finished with it.

The project adds a different kind of work to the portrait. It requires coordination across people who have different reasons for getting involved. Someone wants equipment responsibly removed; someone else wants children to have computers. Organizing makes those interests useful to one another. O’Day had given herself another job that depended on getting people to take part.

A seat at the table, and something to build with

She founded Olaris in 2014. Company building added another set of demands to her scientific training: recruiting colleagues, developing a business and finding the resources to sustain it. A founder has to make decisions before every uncertainty has been resolved. The scientific education travels with her, though the daily assignment changes.

O’Day’s involvement in conversations about women’s participation also continued. At the World Economic Forum’s 2016 meeting in Davos, she was listed as a discussion leader for a Women in Science session. Other leaders included Jennifer Doudna, Suzanne Fortier and Suchitra Sebastian. The program asked how technological change could enable women to take more leadership roles in science and technology.

It was a larger setting for a question she had encountered much earlier. In a high school, the immediate issue was whether girls could imagine entering science. At an international meeting, the question included leadership. Between the two sits a long series of opportunities, decisions and introductions. An invitation matters at more than one point in a career.

WEST honored O’Day at its 2018 Giving Back Awards, in the category Unsung Heroines Doing Extraordinary Things. Her activities included mentoring and PhiSB, the women’s network she founded. The network’s stated purpose was to connect and celebrate women seeking to make a positive contribution. Once again, she had made room in her work for organizing other people’s connections.

Olaris also joined the inaugural MassNextGen cohort. The program combined financial support with executive coaching. O’Day welcomed the practical help and raised a pointed concern about recognition without resources. For someone trying to build a company, an honor and the means to act on it answer different needs. Coaching, introductions and capital can affect what a founder is able to attempt.

Make room for the next person

Another way to understand O’Day’s work is to follow someone who joined it. Chen Dong began at Olaris as an intern in 2019, working on interactive tools for data analysis and visualization. After completing his master’s degree, he joined full time as a data scientist. An initial opportunity had become a continuing role.

O’Day spoke about recognizing his contribution within weeks. She valued the combination of statistical and machine-learning skills with a willingness to learn the nuances of biology. That is a concrete account of what a colleague contributes. It also describes the kind of development an internship can make possible when someone is given consequential work and room to learn.

Her investment venture, ODAY Capital, states a related ambition: to back entrepreneurs she can help through her own experience. The founder becomes someone another founder can approach. Her earlier experience does not remove the work ahead for anyone else. It may provide useful advice, an introduction or a clearer view of a decision.

O’Day’s career contains the conventional markers of scientific and entrepreneurial progress. It also contains an unusual collection of invitations: come onto campus, try the subject, meet a mentor, join the project, do some work with us. The schoolgirls who prompted that first program had offered an opinion. O’Day’s answer was to arrange a visit.