Meet the Synthace
leadership team.

Markus is the CEO and Chief Scientific Officer at Synthace—and one of the UK’s leading visionaries for how we, as a society, can do better biology. Originally establishing Synthace as a synthetic biology company, he was struck with the conviction that so much potential progress is held back by tedious, one-dimensional, error-prone, manual work. Instead, what if we could lift the whole experimental cycle into the cloud and make software and machines carry more of the load? He’s been answering this question ever since.

Markus holds a PhD in Plant Biochemistry from Durham University. He was previously a research associate in synthetic biology at University College London and a Biotransformation Scientist at Novacta Biosystems.

Hobbies: playing piano, growing plants, reading science fiction

Role model: his Dad, a biochemist, who taught him Design of Experiments (along with a great many other things!)

Richard is the Chief Commercial Officer at Synthace.

An engineer by training and inclination, Richard has been an innovator in drug discovery technology for over 25 years. He has held engineering positions at TTP group and The Automation Partnership, pioneers of robotic sample handling and cell culture. Later, Richard co-founded Titian Software, whose "Mosaic" product remains the leading sample management platform in life science R&D. His global business development experience includes Europe, the US, China and Japan.

Richard holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

Michael (better known as Sid) is the CTO at Synthace. A polymath at his core, his knowledge of biology, statistics, and computer science, plus 20 years' experience consulting on DOEs across a range of biological fields, give him the unique insight required to lead technical and product development at Synthace. 

For the past 25 years, Sid has been on a mission to break down the barriers between computational and wet-lab research in biology. Joining Synthace in 2012 as the first computational hire has allowed Sid to fulfil his ambitions by creating software that gives biologists access to DOE and other powerful experimental techniques. 

Sid has a PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Leeds, as well as degrees in mathematics and pharmacology. Before joining Synthace, he was an academic researching protein structure and evolution at UCL and the MRC National Institute for Medical Research (one of the founding institutes of the Crick).

Hobbies: Performing alternative rock music (singing, bass, guitar), composing and producing electronic music, cooking, photography, electronics, art, puzzles, reading, being a play-thing to his children. 

Role models: Thomas Young, Grigori Perelman, Sam Gamgee, Brian Eno

Synthace's Director of Science Nuno Leitão is a bioengineer, turned molecular biologist, turned automation and DOE specialist, with a real passion for leading teams that build tools for enabling better science, for scientists. With over 12 years of experience in academia and industry, Nuno has worked directly with scientists from multiple companies in drug discovery, designing different experimental strategies for optimizing enzymatic and cell-based assays.

Before Synthace, his research used live calcium imaging, genetics, and molecular assays to uncover how calcium signalling encoding impacted development and innate immunity in plants.

Hobbies: Dancing Lindy Hop, growing plants, and doing the occasional bit of baking.

Role model: His parents

Abdul Rahim Bah is an engineering leader with over 15 years of experience, including 9 where he grew diverse, multidisciplinary teams at scale-ups and enterprise organizations. He has provided strategic leadership across various engineering functions in SaaS companies, including product engineering, site reliability engineering, and platform engineering. 

Previously, he led the SRE team at 10x Future Technologies, which was responsible for building and launching JP Morgan's first UK retail bank offering, and has worked at FICO, Research In Motion, and Mavenir Systems.

Hobbies: Family time. Watching, playing, eating and drinking sports. Most recently cycling.

Role model: My parents