Nominated for Life Science Company of the Year
The first major project I led since my PhD got Intellegens nominated for Life Science Company of the Year at the 2026 Cambridge Independent Science & Technology Awards - and I could not be more proud.
We did not win on the night. I am writing this anyway, because the nomination still feels enormous, and because it is the clearest sign yet that the years I put into this work were seen as mattering.
The project
After my PhD I joined Intellegens in 2024. The company already had a strong reputation in materials and chemistry; my job was to open up something new - oligonucleotide manufacturing - and make ML genuinely useful there.
That became the first programme I led end to end: what is now Alchemite™ for Oligonucleotide Manufacturing. The science was not “find more data.” The experiments were rich and complete. The hard part was getting that completeness out of the places it actually lived - synthesis reports, mass spectrometry outputs, purification traces - and into a form models could learn from.
So I built robust pipelines: automating extraction from synthesis reports, identifying species from mass spectrometry reports, and feeding structured features into Alchemite™. On top of that came the work nobody photographs - demos in front of sceptical R&D teams, webinars, technical papers, debugging workflows at odd hours, tightening extraction logic when a new report layout appeared, and explaining Gaussian processes and active learning to people who quite reasonably wanted to know why they should trust a prediction about an impurity peak or a yield bottleneck.
It was not one breakthrough afternoon. It was months of iteration, then more months, then product leadership on the same programme before I moved into a broader solutions role. Through all of it, this project stayed the spine of much of what I was known for at the company - and much of what Intellegens showed the world in life sciences.
Seeing that work sit behind a company-level nomination is strange in the best way.
How much work this actually was
People outside R&D software rarely see the full stack. There is the model, yes - but also the integration I designed, the customer-specific automation, the pipelines that turn a PDF synthesis report or a mass spec export into something the platform can learn from, the demo where you have twelve minutes to show that work end to end, and the collaboration with commercial and engineering teams to turn a proof of concept into something product-shaped.
I lost count of how many live demonstrations and training sessions I gave. Eighty is a conservative estimate and still does not capture the prep: understanding a new customer’s process, mapping their analytical landscape, and translating outputs into language a process chemist can act on the next morning.
There were conference posters, panels, preprints, and partner projects - including work that fed into open literature on machine learning in oligonucleotide therapeutics manufacturing. Intellegens is a team, and oligonucleotide manufacturing is a team sport across chemistry, data, and software. I am not claiming solo credit. But I know how many late evenings I spent on this, and I know how much of myself I put into getting it right.
So when the Cambridge Independent listed Intellegens as a nominee, it was not an abstract “well done, sector.” It felt like recognition that the problem I had chosen - making ML genuinely useful for oligo process development - was worth taking seriously, and that I had led something substantial enough to help put the company in that room.
We did not win - and I am still glad
I will not pretend I was not nervous before the ceremony, or that I did not want the trophy. Of course I did. When the winner was announced and it was someone else, there was a flat moment, then applause, then the usual polite mingling. No dramatic story - just the quiet anticlimax most finalists know.
What stayed with me afterwards was not bitterness. It was something closer to gratitude. My first big project after the PhD had helped get us considered, in public, among the most meaningful life-science businesses in this region. Nobody handed me that on a plate.
I am honoured - genuinely - that what I built was seen as part of a story worth telling, even if we did not take home the award.
The bit I do not say often in technical posts
I am not from a professional family background. No lawyers, no doctors, no inherited network of “people who know people” in science or tech. If you had asked teenage me where I would be in my late twenties, I would have laughed. University felt like a stretch; Cambridge felt like fiction; leading a major industrial ML programme for oligonucleotide manufacturing after a PhD would have sounded like madness.
I got here through stubbornness, luck, good mentors, rowing crews that taught me how to show up when you are tired, and an unreasonable willingness to learn things I did not understand yet. The nomination does not rewrite that history - but it is a marker on the path, and it tells me the path was real.
What I am taking forward
The oligonucleotide solution still matters. Customers still use it; I am still close to the science in my current role; there are still harder reports to parse and harder questions to answer. Awards are a snapshot. The work continues.
If you are early in a career that did not look likely from where you started: this post is for you too. The nomination is not the finish line. It is proof that serious people noticed serious effort - and that is allowed to be enough for one night, even when someone else’s name is on the trophy.
I am proud of what I led. I am proud Intellegens was in that room. And I am already back at the interesting part - the next experiment, the next pipeline, the next problem that does not fit neatly in a category box.
That is where I have always done my best work anyway.