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Dr. Sarra Achouri: Inspiring Women in STEM and Revolutionising Learning with AI

ai entrepreneurship women in business Oct 03, 2024

Dr. Lynn Morgan MBE Interviews Dr. Sarra Achouri, Co-founder and Chief Delivery Officer of Obrizum

I was fortunate to participate as a Mentor in the Rising Mentoring Circles session at the Rising Festival on Saturday, September 21, in Cambridge. During this session, I provided advice and mentoring to professionals navigating their career paths. As I spoke with many young women and heard their stories, common themes emerged, including concerns about when to have children, whether switching career paths is wise, and the possibility of ‘having it all.’ I wish they could have had a chance to chat with Dr. Sarra Achouri, although time is very precious for her. Here’s her story.

 As one of the co-founders of Obrizum can you explain what the company does:

Obrizum uses AI technology to transform training content into multi-dimensional learning ecosystems that adapt to the exact needs of businesses, teams, and individuals. It enables our clients to design unique digital learning paths tailored to user knowledge gaps and behaviours. And our reporting tools deliver insights to inform data-driven decisions every step of the way.

You did your PhD here in Cambridge at Lucy Cavendish College.  I believe your subject was bio-physics and that you initially went into research after your PhD.  What led you and your co-founders to set up the company

After my PhD, I took a research job at the university and embarked on a natural post-doc path given my background. After two short post-docs, I got a fellowship with my own funding and somewhat more independence and freedom to make decisions while still being affiliated with a couple of departments and working with my mentors.

This provided fertile ground for the next step: becoming an entrepreneur. My co-founders Beza (Agley) and Juergen (Fink) had slightly different experiences from mine but the same entrepreneurial fiber. The three of us embarked on this journey motivated by our own needs as entrepreneurial scientists. We just had to seek and absorb knowledge and new technology ourselves and realized that we heavily depended on reporting literature that wasn't necessarily designed to teach others to master and apply the great science reported in those articles.

It was quite difficult to effectively transfer that kind of expertise, so we started organizing events that would allow top scientists to teach and transfer their know-how in powerful new technologies to other scientists. We commercialized that offering, for which the demand quickly became international. When we realized the scale of the demand, we immediately understood that we were going to leave academia to focus on this exciting opportunity and that we would leverage the latest developments in AI to create something truly unique. 

You grew up in France, did you always have an interest in science or do you think that the French school system was particularly good at encouraging girls to take an interest in STEM subjects?

That's a great question. I'm not sure the French school system is what led me to science. My father was a software engineer and my mother was a full-time mum with a teaching background. They came from very humble backgrounds in Tunisia and they were part of the first generation to receive an education in their families.

Academic excellence was nurtured in my siblings and me from a young age, especially around science, medicine, and STEM subjects in general, as a way to open life-improving opportunities for ourselves and those depending on us when the time comes. Would I have followed a STEM academic path if I weren't the daughter of high-achieving immigrants? Maybe... Or maybe I would have been a Historian... I'll never know and that's ok by me.

Do you feel that in your education and career to date, being a woman has in any way created barriers for you in the education system or the workplace?

The truth is I've always been oblivious to those barriers. I know now they existed, in my upbringing, there were so many things I was discouraged or forbidden from doing as a young girl, but it never applied to education. There was nothing I was told I couldn't or shouldn't study for being a girl.

School was the one place where my gender didn't create any limitations for me. I had fantastic teachers, men and women who have marked me for life. In fact, all my best STEM subject teachers were women! And all the best students in my class until a certain age were girls. So I would say there were zero barriers for me in the education system.

I also didn't encounter barriers in the workplace, they encountered me, and all the strong women who made me who I was! I encountered some sexism for sure, but thankfully I got to be born in an era where all the -isms were in people's minds, opinions, unkind words or actions, but not in the law or the policies of the schools I went to and the places I worked. A bit like a hurdles race. Some people said things or did things they intended to be barriers to my progression, but you just have to keep running. Sometimes you jump over them, sometimes you kick them out of your way. So yes there were unpleasant confrontations, but thanks to healthy structures around me, at home, and from mentors and friends, they never stopped me. If anything they raised the bar for me which made me more ambitious and resilient. If I could overcome that 'barrier' what else could I achieve? How far could I go? I'm a lot more mellow now that I have children, I chased my personal potential all my life, and I'm proud of it, but now I seek to build stability around what I have achieved for my girls. I want them to look at any challenge and think a) I can do it and b) I won't give up. 

Being a co-founder of a business, growing it and having very young children must be exhausting.

That's the biggest challenge I've ever faced, to be honest. But I am not alone, my husband is extremely supportive of my work and a wonderful father to our girls. His parents live 20 minutes from us so they also helped us a lot in the beginning and continue to be there for us anytime we need them. The girls also go to a lovely nursery 5 minutes from our house and love it there. We're very lucky! But I'd be lying if I said it's not tough, I felt so much guilt for being so absent at home. I also felt more stressed at work when I moved from a 7-day to a 5-day week so I could be around at home during the weekend.  As you mature as a parent but also simply from getting older and experiencing tough things in life, you start accepting that you can't have it all, you have to adjust your priorities and accept that you'll miss some things. I’m not sure it applies to everyone, but it works for me. I feel less guilt and less stress now that I've adapted my mind around it.

Pregnancy and maternal leave are 2 things where one cannot pretend men and women are equal. As a woman, expecting a child and giving birth are physically, physiologically, emotionally, and mentally tough. It's not a competition but this is a fact, it takes its toll on women more than men. When you take maternity leave, women usually take more time off and that's fair however as co-founder of a start-up you really can’t be away for too long.

You employ a lot of ‘techy’ people.  Do you find there is any gender difference in the number of applications or skillsets?  If so, in what way?

Great question. Yes, there is a difference for sure. It's a very sensitive subject because everyone wants a diverse team, and everyone looking at a company wants to see diversity in that company. In reality, we are still seeing so many companies almost exclusively led by white men at the board and C-suite level.

I'm really proud to have a very diverse founding team on multiple criteria, and we also have a very diverse and inclusive wider team. However, there are areas of the company where we have more men than women and others where it's the other way around. Mostly it comes down to the diversity in the applicants from the start.

But I also personally think that there is a fundamental difference between men and women on average (of course, it's not always true) where men seem to look for reasons to apply, ticking every requirement they fulfil, and if they feel they tick enough boxes, they'll apply.

Whereas women tend to do the opposite: if they don't tick one or two requirements, they won't apply, thinking they wouldn't qualify. We see the same approaches during the interview process. If I ask, "Do you know Excel?" men tend to respond with something like, "Yes, I'm familiar with the tool and am comfortable using it," when they have probably used it a handful of times. In contrast, women might say, "Well, I have used it, and I think I'm okay with it, but I'm not an expert," when they've used it weekly for two years.

That is not a biological difference; it's environmentally and experientially programmed into our brains from an early age. It’s important not to see this as a difference in skills or self-confidence but rather just a difference in mindsets when it comes to mistakes and the pursuit of perfection.

AI is in the news a lot at the moment and people are concerned as to what the future of AI holds.  What are your thoughts on the way things are going?

I think AI is a tool and tools are made by humans to hopefully benefit humans. It's a powerful technology that can be used for good. We're seeing it in medical diagnostics where AI can help early detection of certain cancers for example. At Obrizum we use it to make learning more efficient and adapted to learners' needs. There are so many positive applications of AI, and there are more and more regulations to safeguard it. So overall I am excited about AI and what we can do with it. Perhaps the biggest concerns around AI are about AI replacing us in our jobs which can be true to some extent in the same way self-checkouts have replaced parts of the workforce in supermarkets. But the development of AI is also part of an era of unprecedented technological advancement that makes mankind more and more powerful. Perhaps that's the real concern to me, what will we do with all that power, not what will AI do to us.

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