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Phelim Bradley

Phelim Bradley

CEO & co‑founder, Prolific — computational biologist turned entrepreneur

phelim
London, United Kingdom
Joined May 2024
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Prolific Leadership

Summary

Technical genomicist and builder: Bradley trained in physics and computational biology and during his DPhil at Oxford produced widely used bioinformatics tools (e.g., Mykrobe) and led the development of BIGSI, a scalable search index for public microbial genomic archives — work that demonstrates strengths in algorithm design, large‑scale data engineering, and applied computational genomics. ac+2
Research‑to‑product founder: He built Prolific originally while in academia and transitioned from CTO to CEO to scale the platform from an academic tool into a commercial marketplace used by researchers and AI developers, showing product leadership and the ability to translate research problems into reliable, production‑grade services. prolific+2
Academic impact and collaboration: Bradley is a highly cited co‑author on multiple genomics and public‑health genomics papers (including Nature Biotechnology and Nature Communications co‑authorships), indicating sustained academic contribution and close collaboration with clinical and public‑health groups. google+1
Operator and ecosystem participant: Participation in Y Combinator (S19) and a public venture‑partner role at Pioneer Fund show active engagement with the startup and VC ecosystems; Bradley now blends operator experience (scaling product and teams) with advising and investing. ycombinator+1

Work

Education

Projects

Writing

Celebrating Prolific's 10‑Year anniversary (company post)

April 10, 2024

A longform company/leadership post authored by Bradley reflecting on Prolific's mission, growth, and next steps — useful to understand his public thinking about product, data, and research ethics.

Favicon imageprolific.com

Ultrafast search of all deposited bacterial and viral genomic data

January 1, 2019

Describes BIGSI: combining microbial population genomics with web‑search computational methods to index and search hundreds of thousands of bacterial and viral whole‑genome sequence datasets with low storage overhead.

Favicon imagepubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Rapid antibiotic‑resistance predictions from genome sequence data

January 1, 2015

Paper describing methods for predicting antibiotic resistance from genome sequencing for pathogens including Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis; work connected to the Mykrobe project.

Favicon imagendm.ox.ac.uk

Hobbies

Public speaking and writing about AI, research quality, and human‑centred data (frequent conference talks, company blog posts, and interviews). prolific+1