You're building at the frontier of hard science.
The roadmap needs thirty people; you have three and a runway.
AI lets your three-person team research, prototype, and ship like thirty.
1 Reactorfield is a four-week program that accelerates R&D by embedding agents into scientific workflows.
2 Do less grunt work. Do more science. Delegate the reading, coding, and first-pass analysis to agents the way a PI delegates to grad students. Save your own hours for what counts: judgment, taste, and choosing the next experiment.
Learn what frontier models can do, adopt the AI-native mindset, and build AI into your own research workflows.
Sessions that show you what to automate.
Operators and researchers from frontier AI labs and science-AI companies share the workflows they actually use and ship.
1:1 sessions to guide you from choosing what to automate to unblocking broken agent loops.
A stack and support to make it run in your lab.
An owned set of skills, hooks, loops, and prompts configured for scientific work. Yours to keep, extend, and adapt to your research.
Deals, credits, and priority support from our science-AI partners, the same tools you'll use in your builds.
A weekly cadence that keeps momentum real.
Set a goal each week, then present what changed: “I automated this.” Leave with a concrete next build, not a vague intention.
Fellows present what they automated, so an idea from one lab becomes leverage for another.
Selected teams get hands-on AI deployment support in their own lab. A forward deployed engineer will come to your lab to wire AI directly into your workflows.
You're building at the frontier of hard science.
The roadmap needs thirty people; you have three and a runway.
AI lets your three-person team research, prototype, and ship like thirty.
You run a lab, finish a PhD, or grind through a postdoc.
Publishing, collaborating, mentoring, and permanently behind on the literature.
AI compresses months of reading into days and hands busywork to agents.
You do science where it meets product: biotech, pharma, materials, climate.
Every experiment competes with deadlines, messy data, and impatient stakeholders.
AI takes you from experiment to defensible insight in days.
The computer didn't belong to one kind of scientist. It became the ground everyone worked on. AI is that next layer: not a gadget or a productivity tool, but a tool that changes how research itself gets done. Explore the ways AI is already transforming how research happens.
Read the entire published body of a field overnight and return a structured map of what is known, what is contradictory, and what is missing, then generate testable hypotheses and surface analogies across disciplinary silos.
Thousands of papers read overnight and returned as a structured gap map. Systematic screening and extraction done with agents running in parallel. Every unresolved contradiction in a subfield enumerated on demand, with analogies drawn across every field at once.
Extract quantitative property data from a fragmented, multilingual literature and propose specific candidate compositions, molecules, or genes, including underexplored options found by analogy across material and biological classes.
Property data extracted from full texts and underexplored composition spaces flagged in days. All published SAR for a drug target synthesized and ADMET liabilities predicted in hours. Candidate sorbents, catalysts, electrolytes, and resistance genes proposed by analogy.
Read thousands of patents to map claim scope across whole portfolios, identify prior art and freedom-to-operate (FTO) gaps, and propose design-arounds for blocking patents.
Claim scope mapped across full portfolios in days, with design-arounds for blocking patents. Literature and patents mined together to map prior art, find FTO gaps, and propose novel candidates.
Design biological systems, including protein and enzyme variants, metabolic pathways, genome-scale models, gene edits, and crop crosses, by synthesizing structural, mutagenesis, homolog, and field-trial data before any wet-lab work begins.
Position-specific protein mutability returned in hours. Pathway designs and enzyme efficiencies synthesized to route around competing drains. CRISPR guide design, off-target prediction, and regulatory class combined in one pass.
Turn raw, high-volume measurement data (images, spectra, omics layers, sequences, and free-text records) into scientific conclusions, read against literature benchmarks.
Imaging scored at scale by vision models and read against literature benchmarks. Pathway enrichment and hypotheses generated automatically from multi-omic data.
Turn plain-language specifications into working domain-specific code (hardware description, verification testbenches, bioinformatics pipelines, and robot control programs) so that non-programmers can produce it.
Whole register-transfer-level (RTL) modules scaffolded from plain-language specs. Testbench skeletons, assertions, and coverage models generated from plain-language test plans. RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) and single-cell pipelines generated, debugged, and documented.
Interpret simulation or experiment results, propose the next parameters to try, and search large design or route spaces in a closed loop, so optimization runs faster than humans can iterate, and select the best option scored against full criteria.
Electronic-design-automation (EDA) reports interpreted and next parameters proposed, collapsing weeks of iteration into days. Experiment results read and the next experiment proposed in a closed loop, 24/7. Trade studies, dispatch, and route selection grounded in full precedent.
Synthesize heterogeneous, multimodal operational data (sensor streams, logs, metrology, telemetry, maintenance history) against a knowledge base to rank root causes of failures and predict failures before they happen.
Statistical-process-control (SPC) data, tool logs, and maintenance history synthesized at once, with root causes in hours. Anomalies matched to fleet-wide failure signatures for remote diagnosis without a dispatch. Sensor health read against failure signatures to predict useful life and time maintenance exactly.
Before an expensive run or design is committed, enumerate the ways it can fail (failure modes, hazards, scale-up pitfalls) by synthesizing analogous prior cases, and propose mitigations up front.
Failure modes and mitigations for analogous reactions synthesized to quantify risk before the first large run. FMEA drafts built from failure histories in hours, surfacing modes that bias usually hides.
Make decades of fragmented, multilingual, classified, half-digitized, or about-to-retire engineering knowledge fully queryable, especially multi-decade materials-qualification archives, and identify the gaps systematically.
Multilingual, multi-decade data synthesized in full. Qualification gaps identified systematically. Make retiring expertise permanently queryable.
Continuously check artifacts and data streams against rulebooks, specifications, and acceptance criteria (design rules, requirements, certificates, safety signals), flagging only the exceptions and turning periodic manual review into a live process.
Design-rule queries answered instantly and violations caught at schematic entry rather than sign-off. Traceability matrices built and kept current from spec documents, with changes propagated downstream. Certificate values extracted and compared to limits, flagging only exceptions. Adverse-event patterns synthesized continuously, turning quarterly review into a live process.
For centuries, scientific progress has been bound by the limits of human bandwidth, how many papers one person can read, how many hypotheses one mind can hold, how many experiments one team can run.
AI doesn't remove those limits. It multiplies the scientist behind them.
We built Reactorfield because we believe that the next generation of scientific breakthroughs won't just come from better models or bigger datasets. They'll come from researchers who know exactly how to put these tools to work, who treat AI not as a novelty, but as an indispensable member of their team.
This is a training ground for that scientist. For you.
Applications close August 10, 2026 · Program runs August 31 - September 28, 2026
Scientists, engineers, and researchers across domains: academic, industry, or builders. Teams are encouraged to apply together: the program is for the people doing the work, not only the person with the title.
It is a sprint, and it is meant to feel like one. Plan for live sessions plus serious build time on your own research every week for four weeks. Fellows who protect the hours get a transformed workflow; there is no passive version of this.
Hybrid. Live sessions run online throughout the program, with in-person components for the cohort. Field deployments, for selected teams, happen on-site in your lab.
No. Reactorfield is non-dilutive and supported as a public-good initiative to accelerate science.
No. You need depth in your own science and a willingness to rebuild how you work. We close the gap between what frontier models can do and how you use them. That is the whole point of the program.
A working, AI-native version of your own research workflow, running on your questions and your data, plus the judgment to keep it current as the tools change, and a cohort of peers across deep tech who share what works.
We review every submission and follow up with short interviews for the strongest builders, usually one or two calls before a fast decision. We select for scientific depth, willingness to adapt AI-native mindset, and urgency to implement AI workflows that accelerate your science.
Unicorn founder, YC W19, trained chemist. Previously built a deep-tech fellowship supported by founders of Varda, Astranis, and Solugen, that attracted talent from OpenAI, DeepMind, and SpaceX.
2x founder (YC S21) who shipped AI agents used by millions even before ChatGPT existed, then ran a VC/accelerator, investing in 150+ startups and helping them raise $100M+ in follow-on funding.