Founder Story

I became passionate about automating scientific workflows during my PhD in dementia research, when I used programming tools extensively for hardware control of a custom-built microscope, image analysis, and statistical analysis and data visualisation.

Since then, I have continued developing my computational skills while seeking opportunities to apply these experiences back to scientific research, not only because it is where I started my career, but also because I recognise that the engineering needs of scientific research are growing rapidly.

During 2023–2026 working as an informatics specialist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, I have experienced those growing needs from the academics I interacted with.

Around the same time, I noticed the potential of AI coding agents since late 2024 and started to experiment with them.

This eventually led to my career-defining realisation that there is now a path to pair the “thinking speed” in a typical academic setting with the “building speed” of an engineering solution.

Agentic coding has great compatibility with the need for rapid prototyping in a typical academic setting.

My article about how I almost replaced myself with an AI agent described the AI agentic loop I developed.

My vision is to have a synergistic partnership between research scientists and engineers, the latter help navigate the fast-changing landscape of AI by:

However, the reach, capacity and experience of me as a solo consultant is far from enough.

This is why I am establishing Cire, to gather like-minded research engineers and combine our informatics skills, research domain knowledge and AI agentic development experience.

Together, we will seek clients in and beyond biosciences research to push this movement forward.