Welcome to the team!

Welcome to the Team

Meet Our New VP, Academic & Institutions and Senior Software Engineer

We're so excited to introduce our two new team members: Dr. Igor Osipov, Ph.D. will be joining us as VP, Academic & Institutions, and Tawnee Allport as our new Senior Software Engineer!

Igor Osipov, Ph.D., VP, Academic & Institutions

Igor has spent more than 20 years where research, publishing, and technology meet. He was Regional Managing Director at Elsevier Science & Technology, then moved to Digital Science, where he helped launch the Dimensions platform and served as CEO of its Eastern European subsidiary. More recently he led global institutional and channel partnerships at Writefull and scite. He has sat on both sides of the table: he knows what research offices need, how universities decide what to adopt, and what it takes to make a new tool stick.

From the Arctic to the Research Office

Igor started as a researcher. He spent nearly ten years doing Arctic research across Alaska, Canada, and Russia, and holds a Ph.D. in social sciences and decision making from the University of Alberta, an M.A. from the University of Sussex, and a B.A. in social anthropology from the University of Alaska. He has also built things from scratch: as founding president of the Endowment Foundation at Far Eastern Federal University, he raised the first $10 million in funds. He has chaired the UArctic Research Analytics Institute and taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta's Alberta School of Business.

He has a clear view on AI in research: it should help researchers, not replace them. AI tools can write text that sounds right but isn't, invent citations, and miss anything after their training cutoff, so a person should stay in charge of the work. That is how we build Atom. The tool finds funding, drafts, and checks. The researcher decides.

In his role, Igor will grow our partnerships with universities and research institutions and make sure every research office we work with gets real value from the platform.

Tawnee Allport, Senior Software Engineer

Tawnee brings eight years of engineering experience, focused on frontend development with work across the full stack. She has built user-facing products at several startups, taking on whatever the team needed as priorities shifted.

Before that, she ran her own web development shop, building websites for small businesses and working directly with owners to bring their ideas to life. That habit of listening first, then building, carries into how she designs for researchers.

Making Grant Search Simpler

Finding funding takes too much time. Tawnee wants to change that by building interfaces that make grant search simpler and more approachable, so researchers can spend less time searching and more time on their research. She's looking forward to a team where ideas move quickly into action and the product keeps improving based on feedback. That's how we like to work too.

Outside work, Tawnee lives near Yellowstone, so most of her free time goes to hiking and finding new trails. You'll often find her with a guitar, working on a song or learning something new. In her role, Tawnee will shape the Atom frontend, with a focus on clear, intuitive experiences for researchers and research offices.

Looking Ahead

Igor and Tawnee cover two ends of what we do: the relationships with research institutions, and the product those institutions and their researchers use. We're glad to have them both.

Welcome to the team, Igor and Tawnee! We can't wait to see what we'll accomplish together.