Skip to content
Personal site

Dr Peter McCann Strain

Founder, CTO, AI Engineer and Oxford DPhil

Welcome. I’m Peter. I build AI products, research difficult problems, and sometimes turn those problems into companies. This is a map of the work so far.

About Peter

Professional Experience

I’ve worked across AI research, engineering and product development, from Oxford and Astroscale to SThree and the companies I’m building now.

CTO and Technical Founder

Founder venture · 2025 to present · In production and in pilot across practices

Conversico is an AI voice receptionist for UK dental practices. It is in production and in pilot across practices. Greeta answers missed, overflow and out-of-hours calls, supports booking within a practice's rules and hands difficult calls back to a person. I built the website, Greeta application, operator dashboard, architecture, demo and product code. The clinical founders shape the practice workflow and requirements. A multi-agent approach is in development to coordinate several processes inside dental practices.

Founder and Sole Engineer

Praviar
Founder venture · 2025 to present · In production and preparing to go to market

Pharmaceutical patent research has to connect legal text with chemical structures in patent drawings. I conceived, designed and built Praviar alone to support freedom-to-operate research. It combines AI-assisted research with software checks and human review. Its computer-vision pipeline reads compounds and generic Markush structures from patent drawings and was tested on held-out examples. The product is in production and preparing to go to market.

Founding AI Engineer

SThree plc
Sept 2024 to Present

I joined SThree as one of two founding AI engineers. Since then, I have helped conceive and build its live recruitment platform, which matches candidates to roles, analyses CVs, conducts phone interviews and produces shortlists. I also conceived, designed, built, tested and productionised Aurum, the 25-agent synthetic-data system used to test and improve that platform. The AI engineering team grew from 2 to 20, while the dedicated recruitment-platform team is now close to 100 people.

PROJECTS (5)

Datamise supports equal-pay claims involving Birmingham City Council and more than 40 other UK employers, including work in Leeds. Its use continues to grow across UK campaigns. Datamise supported campaigns in which more than £300m in claims were resolved. GMB, legal teams, unions and claimants led the campaigns. I co-founded the company, and Datamise built the wider claims system for GMB's equal-pay work. I personally built SettleMise from scratch as a Mac desktop application and a web application. Both versions were used directly in the Birmingham settlement negotiations. Teams from GMB and Leigh Day could change assumptions and see numbers and charts update while options were discussed. SettleMise continues to be used across equal-pay claims beyond Birmingham. Its use continues to grow.

PROJECTS (2)

Personal Assistant AI

Independent project
Ongoing · Private system in daily personal use

I built Personal Assistant AI because I wanted to reduce the mental overhead of capturing ideas, remembering context, reviewing commitments, planning and taking action. The working system uses 8 specialist agents. I conceived, designed and built it alone, and I use it every day. The source is now available as the Personal Execution OS public preview. My deployment and data remain private. It is not a hosted product and is not available to buy.

CivTech 11.5 Innovator, Scottish Government

CivTech Scotland (Scottish Government Programme)
Sept 2025 to Nov 2025

I was the only solo entrant selected, alongside 24 companies, for the £5,000 CivTech 11.5 Exploration grant. I produced an accelerator plan for a human-led AI system covering Scotland's eight impact-assessment types. The work concluded at the Exploration stage and was not deployed.

PROJECTS (2)

Computer Vision Engineer

Astroscale Ltd
April 2022 to Sept 2024

I spent 2.5 years at Astroscale building satellite position and orientation software specifically for ELSA-M. The pose system reached about four degrees of orientation error. I also built AstroGAN, which substantially reduced the measured gaps on proxy measures, but I left before completing downstream pose-estimation validation.

PROJECTS (3)

DPhil Researcher, AI and Clinical Medicine

University of Oxford
2017 to 2022

Completed a DPhil in AI and Clinical Medicine, funded by a £125,000 Medical Research Council scholarship. The research used deep learning to study mouse placental histology, including cell detection and classification, whole-slide tissue segmentation and analysis of cell morphology across genotypes and phenotypes.

PROJECTS (3)

The work in motion

Product walkthroughs, a research film and one personal film. Press play if you want to see the work rather than read about it.

Greeta: AI voice receptionist for dental practices

A public walkthrough of the live Conversico product. The recorded call is real. The summary figures are illustrative examples, not reported customer outcomes. The price shown is part of the film, not current pricing information.

SettleMise: equal-pay valuation workspace

I built SettleMise from scratch as a Mac desktop application and a web application. Both versions were used directly in the Birmingham settlement negotiations. SettleMise is also used across equal-pay claims beyond Birmingham, and its use continues to grow.

Visual overview

Bounded Returns to Orchestration

A six-minute visual introduction to the research.

Read the full paper

Gran's birthday film: family photos brought to life

A personal film made for Peter's gran's 85th birthday. I kept the animation gentle so the people remained recognisable instead of making the movement dramatic.

Oxford DPhil research in medical AI, from whole-slide tissue segmentation and cell classification to biological analysis.

Research & Methods

Medical imaging, satellite vision, AI evaluation and production methods.

Bounded Returns to Orchestration

My sole-authored paper compares 11 deep-research architectures across 90 queries. The main comparison holds GPT-4o and the tool layer fixed, with a separate local-model comparison and a 3-judge reliability audit.

The results point to bounded, task-dependent returns from orchestration and a synthesis ceiling beneath the strongest systems

Independent
Read the paper

Automated Placental Imaging Pipeline

An automated mouse placental imaging pipeline spanning whole-slide image handling, detecting individual cells, sorting them into 8 types at 89% accuracy, tracing tissue outlines, extracting measurements, and comparing traits across animals.

Combined dataset construction, annotation, supervised computer vision, cautious self-supervised experiments and comparisons across normal and gene-edited placentas

Oxford DPhil
Read the Oxford thesis

AstroGAN: Testing Synthetic Satellite Images

A network built on an existing open-source model to make synthetic satellite images look more like real ones before pose estimation.

AstroGAN substantially reduced the measured gaps between simulated and laboratory images on proxy measures, but I left before completing downstream pose-estimation validation. This was not an end-to-end positioning result

Astroscale
Read the satellite vision article

SThree Skills Taxonomy Hot-Path Removal

Designed, built and evaluated the Skills Taxonomy work end to end while working with the SThree Skills Taxonomy team. The live production path runs through search, fixed rules and a small classifier over the matched skills, with no live model calls while tagging a CV.

Changed the production economics from roughly £1,800 to about £10 per million CVs and ran about 100 times faster than the shipped first version. Precision was roughly two points lower in a cross-benchmark comparison, and the cost excludes earlier training work

SThree
Read the Skills Taxonomy article

Education

DPhil in AI and Clinical Medicine

University of Oxford

2017 to 2022

Nuffield Department of Medicine · Big Data Institute

Computational Insights into Mouse Placental Histology

Supervisor: Professor Cecilia Lindgren

£125,000 Medical Research Council scholarship

MPhys (Integrated Master's) Physics

University of Strathclyde

2012 to 2017

Computational Physics, Molecular Dynamics, Complex Systems

Molecular Dynamic Simulation in Developing Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques

Radcliffe Camera, Oxford

DPhil in AI and Clinical Medicine

My DPhil was hands-on AI research. I built systems that processed full digitised microscope slides, found and classified cells, traced tissue regions and turned the results into measurements for biological analysis. It taught me to own the whole research pipeline, from images and annotations through to biological results.

£125,000
Medical Research Council scholarship
DPhil
Medical AI and placental histology

Awards & Grants

Medical Research Council Scholarship

£125,000

2017-2022

CivTech 11.5 Exploration Grant

£5,000

2025

Only solo entrant selected, alongside 24 companies

NL Education Trust

£2,250

3 consecutive years

Graduate of the Term

Two-time recipient, selected for contributions to the college

St Anne's College, Oxford

Gold Saltire Award

250+ hours

Community service

Volunteering recognition

Courses & Certifications

MLOps EngineeringAmazon Web Services (AWS)
Innovation Strategy and LeadershipUniversity of Oxford

Governance & Leadership

Investment committee work at Oxford, alongside community leadership across Oxford and Strathclyde.

Investment Committee Member

2021 to 2024

St Anne's College, University of Oxford

Peter was the student representative on an eight-person committee overseeing an approximately £70m endowment. The other members included the College Principal, Treasurer, senior fund managers, professors and alumni leaders.

Dr Peter McCann Strain in a navy suit in a modern office

Community Leadership

Social Secretary, St Anne's College MCR, University of Oxford

2018 to 2022

approximately 4.5 years, with £27,000 managed across the period

Social Secretary, St Anne's / St John's RFC, University of Oxford

2019 to 2020

Organised events for the college rugby club

Student Representative, Physics Department, University of Strathclyde

2012 to 2017

5 consecutive years as undergraduate physics representative

Physics Ball Chair, Physics Department, University of Strathclyde

2017 to 2017

Led the annual departmental formal

School Captain / Head Boy, St Margaret's High School

2011 to 2012

Highest student leadership position in school