Convergent Research announces today that after five extraordinary years of pioneering the organization and its thriving ecosystem of focused research organizations (FROs), co-founder and CEO Adam Marblestone will transition to a strategic advisory role on December 1, 2026. Convergent Research co-founder and President Anastasia Gamick will continue leading the organization forward. There is an active CEO search to find Convergent’s next executive leader. In his new role, Marblestone will remain engaged and join Convergent’s Board of Directors, playing a role in guiding Convergent’s next chapter of growth, and his exciting next adventure will be announced soon.

“It has been a privilege and the highlight of my career to build Convergent and the FRO ecosystem over the past six years,” said Marblestone. “I have total confidence in our exceptional team as they continue their pioneering work and steward the FRO ecosystem.”

FROs are time-bound “scientific startups” built to solve bottlenecks and unlock entire scientific fields. Convergent Research FROs typically secure $20–50 million in funding over three to seven years to deliver critical public goods, including high-impact platforms, datasets, and infrastructure. At the end of that period, an FRO may wind down, be donated to an academic center, or become a traditional nonprofit or commercial venture. Within the existing research ecosystem, FROs play a complementary role. They address problems best solved by multidisciplinary, engineering-intensive teams that are hard to assemble in a university lab or research institute, or that don’t fit a venture capital business model.

Marblestone’s scientific framework for the FRO model grew out of his hands-on experiences as a researcher. His time spent doing research in both the tech sector and academia helped clarify the need for new research models and, while pursuing neuroengineering work in Ed Boyden’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, key discussions with fellow scientists Sam Rodriques and Andrew Payne sparked the foundational idea for FROs, with Rodriques coining the term in his 2019 PhD thesis. Marblestone and Rodriques connected with Tom Kalil, then chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures and now a trusted member of Convergent Research’s board of directors and CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy. With catalytic support and initial funding from Eric and Wendy Schmidt, Marblestone and Gamick launched Convergent Research in fall 2021.

To date, Convergent Research has successfully launched 15 ambitious FROs across diverse disciplines, spanning mathematics, astronomy, and mitochondrial engineering, and it continues to actively source, incubate and launch new FROs at an aggressive pace. Notable achievements include FRO Dragonfly’s custom telescope, which captured groundbreaking images of stellar shockwaves published in Nature earlier this year; Lean FRO’s development of their open source programming language and proof assistant Lean, a valuable tool for formal verification in mathematics and software, and Parallel Squared Technology Institute’s (PTI’s) work scaling up protein analysis to measure protein levels in single cells toward the goal of linking protein patterns to disease. . Expanding internationally, Convergent partnered with the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) to establish two FROs in the United Kingdom and run residency programs that provide training and mentorship for potential future FRO leaders. Having raised more than $450 million, Convergent Research continues to accelerate its momentum with a focus on tools and fundamental infrastructure, AI resilience, sensing technologies, and datasets that complement AI.

“Adam’s visionary leadership and bold thinking have been instrumental in establishing the new scientific structures our research ecosystem needed,” said Gamick. “From day one, we shared a passion for filling these critical scientific gaps. It is tremendously rewarding to see this vision become a reality, and I am thrilled for the exciting opportunities ahead as Convergent keeps evolving its model and striving to make a positive impact on how science is executed.”