Have you ever wondered about the best way to build expertise from scratch? During the last years, Lilit and her colleagues have been pondering over this question. The pieces of the puzzle have come together, and now being one of the founders of the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute, Lilit and the team seem to have developed just the right model. Lilit has more than 10 years of experience in the field of bioinformatics and genomics. She holds an MS degree in biotechnology and MS in Computer Science. She was the first one in Armenia awarded with a PhD in computational biology and genomics from the Institute of Molecular Biology NAS Armenia and Leipzig University Germany. Afterwards, Lilit has conducted postdoctoral studies in computational biology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. In 2021 she became the founding director of the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute. Lilit has been the principal investigator of 3 research grants, an author of 20 peer-reviewed publications, and has won several fellowships in life sciences, including the Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the DAAD German Academic Research Service; has twice been nominated among “the most productive scientists of the year” by the Science Committee of Armenia. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx