Liz O’Day’s first distribution problem involved T-shirts, baby onesies, and the limited storage capacity of a studio-apartment kitchen. She was working toward a doctorate at Harvard. On the side, she had started Lizzard Fashion, an apparel company that used fashion to promote science. Orders grew. Museums picked up the products. A distribution center opened in Chicago. The proceeds supported a travel scholarship for scientists. It looked suspiciously like a company, yet O’Day kept treating it as an entertaining extracurricular.
“I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur for a long time,” she later recalled. The sentence is funny because it contains the plot in miniature. Here was a person making a product, finding customers, building distribution, and attaching the revenue to a mission, all while assuming that entrepreneurship must be something other people did on purpose.
She considered herself a scientist. Strictly. The word gave her a home, a method, and an excuse to keep asking why. Business seemed like a neighboring country with louder citizens. Only after she founded Olaris in 2014 did she recognize the shared border: both scientists and founders become professionally dissatisfied with the way things are.
The work arrived before the identity did.The accidental founder’s first lesson
01 / The early operating systemCuriosity, with laboratory manners
Long before the company titles, O’Day read scientific journals and articles as a child, even when much of the language remained beyond her. College gave that appetite a method. At Boston College, biochemistry moved from fascinating vocabulary to daily practice. Her undergraduate adviser, Evan Kantrowitz, noticed her commitment and urged her to apply for the Beckman Scholars Program. She was selected in 2004.
The important gift was time. The scholarship let her commit more fully to research and see science as a durable career rather than an absorbing interest. She went on to earn an MPhil in Chemistry at the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Fellow, then a PhD in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
At Harvard, her work joined structural biology to metabolomics, the study of small molecules produced by living systems. Genes can describe a set of possibilities. Metabolites offer a closer view of activity in the moment. O’Day saw in that distinction the foundation for a useful diagnostic platform. The idea was scientifically promising. Turning it into a company would require a different form of rigor.
02 / The crossingWhen a question acquires a shipping date
Academia had trained O’Day to protect curiosity. Industry taught her to narrow it without killing it. A research question can remain open because the unknown is valuable. A product has to arrive, fit into someone else’s day, and perform consistently. A company cannot admire its own possibility forever. It must choose.
Olaris became the place where those disciplines met. Its platform integrates metabolomics, machine learning, and biology. That formulation sounds compact. The work behind it is not. Samples must be handled consistently. Signals have to be separated from noise. Statistical models need biological interpretation. The eventual output has to answer a question that matters outside the laboratory.
The translation chain
O’Day learned early that compelling science did not automatically create a compelling business. Diagnostics sit inside a crowded room of stakeholders: researchers, clinicians, commercial partners, investors, regulators, and the people who will ultimately depend on the result. Each group asks a different version of “Does this work?” The founder’s job is to make the answers agree.
That helps explain the breadth of her public career. She has written about emerging technologies for Scientific American. She served as co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Biotechnology. She joined boards and steering groups connected to precision medicine and biological magnetic resonance data. These are not decorative sidelines. They are rooms where a technical idea learns the language of systems.
03 / A useful refusalNo fence between scientist and entrepreneur
O’Day later taught a Boston College course with a title that reads like a deliberate collision: Human Metabolism, Disease and Entrepreneurship. The point was to encourage scientists to imagine products, and to do it before professional identities hardened into rules. Her own initial disconnect between scientist and entrepreneur had become teaching material.
The distinction she draws is not between pure research and grubby commerce. It is between complementary kinds of focus. Academia makes room for unusual questions and deep skill. Industry applies pace, constraint, and the obligation to deliver. O’Day has argued that each side can borrow from the other. Curiosity without delivery may remain private. Delivery without curiosity quickly becomes ordinary.
Do not abandon your expertise when you cross a professional boundary. Carry it across. It is probably the reason you belong in the next room.
Her own map keeps crossing those boundaries. Alongside Olaris, she invests in emerging biotechnology companies through O’Day Capital and scouts for Pillar VC. She founded Proyecto Chispa, a nonprofit that recycled electronics and used the resale of parts to help build computer centers in orphanages. Through WEST, a network supporting women in science and technology, she proposed “rockstar breakfasts” so more women could form personal connections with experienced industry leaders.
There is a consistent operating system beneath the variety. Find a gap. Refuse to treat it as permanent. Build a practical bridge. Sometimes the bridge is a diagnostic platform. Sometimes it is breakfast.
04 / Capital and consequenceAn award cannot hire a scientist
O’Day has collected recognition: a Massachusetts Life Sciences Center Next Generation honor, Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, Worcester Business Journal’s 40 Under Forty, and consecutive finalist selections for EY’s New England Entrepreneur Of The Year. She has also been unusually direct about the limits of recognition.
When Massachusetts launched a program combining non-dilutive funding with executive coaching for women-led life sciences companies, Olaris joined the inaugural cohort. O’Day described a structural disconnect between celebrating women and giving them resources to build. The criticism lands because it is specific. A stage provides visibility. Capital pays for work. Coaching shortens mistakes. Networks open calls that might otherwise remain cold.
Recognition is a signal. Resources are an input.The founder’s version of the difference
The distinction also reveals something about her temperament. O’Day is comfortable with ambition, but she prefers ambition that can be itemized. Which experiment? Which hire? Which collaboration? Which route to access? The glamorous abstraction called “impact” has to survive contact with a spreadsheet and a calendar.
05 / The long middleTwelve years, then scale
By 2026, Olaris had spent twelve years moving through the long middle that founder stories often skip. The company published methods for standardized metabolite profiling, developed diagnostic signatures, built a team in Framingham, and translated a broad technical platform into a first commercial product. Each step exchanged a little possibility for a little reliability.
The publication record shows what that reliability work looks like at human scale. O’Day’s name appears beside chemists, data scientists, biologists, and clinical collaborators. Papers from 2024 examined reproducible profiling with both nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry. A 2025 paper reported metabolite signatures developed through an international collaboration. The authors’ lists are crowded because translation is a team sport. The romantic picture of one scientist discovering a clean answer gives way to a more useful image: people with different vocabularies agreeing on what counts as evidence.
In June, Olaris announced a commercial collaboration with Labcorp intended to expand access to that product through Labcorp’s national infrastructure. For O’Day, the pairing joined Olaris’s science with an established commercial and laboratory network. It was the kind of milestone that makes a quiet decade visible.
The partnership also sharpens the central lesson of her career. A discovery and a delivery system are different inventions. The laboratory can show that a signal exists. The company must make the signal reproducible. A larger partner can help make it reachable. Translation is not the dull administrative afterlife of science. It is the mechanism by which science leaves the building.
O’Day’s path has never been as tidy as the phrase “scientist turned entrepreneur.” She did not stop being one thing and become another. The T-shirts were already an experiment in distribution. The doctorate was already an exercise in building. The teaching, writing, investing, and advisory work all address a version of the same problem: how to move knowledge from the person who has it to the person who can use it.
Even her communication style follows the pattern. Technical talks carry the dense nouns of her field, but the public explanations return to ordinary verbs: reveal, know, choose, act. She has enough respect for complexity to avoid pretending the work is simple, and enough impatience with professional fog to insist that its purpose should be. The combination is less common than it ought to be. Expertise often protects itself with vocabulary. O’Day keeps asking expertise to earn its place in someone else’s decision.
That is why the kitchen full of onesies matters. It catches the founder before she knew the role required a name. She had a question, a product, customers, logistics, and a mission. Years later, the materials changed and the stakes grew. The reflex remained: notice what is missing, then make something that can travel.