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What do you do at SPT Labtech?
Maryia Karpiyevich is a Product Development Scientist at SPT Labtech, working in a highly cross-functional role. She collaborates closely with customers and early adopters, hardware and software engineers, commercial, and product teams to ensure SPT Labtech instruments evolve in line with real scientific needs. Her role focuses on translating customer workflows and emerging trends into meaningful product improvements, helping shape instruments that are intuitive, powerful, and future-ready.
How did your path lead you here?
Maryia’s background is in molecular and cell biology. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a PhD and a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, where her work focused on infectious disease.
Her career took a pivotal turn during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she volunteered to help establish a large-scale COVID testing centre in Cambridge. Working alongside academics and industry partners, she was deeply involved in automation and assay development, an experience that reshaped her career direction.
Following this, Maryia spent time at an automation company, gaining exposure to engineering and system-level development. She joined SPT Labtech in August 2022 at a key moment, supporting the transition of firefly® from development into its first customer deployments. Since then, she has been closely involved in developing firefly as a platform and exploring how it can grow to meet future scientific challenges.
What does a typical day look like?
No two days look the same for Maryia. Depending on the stage of a project, her time may be spent on customer sites working with early-stage instruments, or internally with engineering teams defining requirements and exploring how to further differentiate SPT Labtech products.
A significant part of her role focuses on software, ensuring that complex instrument functionality is presented in a way that feels intuitive, accessible, and empowering for users. She also spends time attending scientific events, staying up to date with emerging techniques, and keeping a close eye on where the industry is heading.
What’s the best part of your job?
Working with customers on translating complex manual workflows into elegant automation solutions is Maryia’s favorite part of the role. Having previously been on the customer side herself, she brings a strong sense of empathy to her work and deeply understands the challenges scientists face in the lab.
She’s passionate about automation as a way to relieve scientists from repetitive manual tasks and enable creative, ambitious experimentation. For Maryia, the most exciting moments come when automation makes previously impossible or impractical experiments a reality.
How are you making a difference at SPT Labtech?
To Maryia, making a difference means empowering scientists to think bigger. Automation removes limitations around time, scale and physical constraints, allowing researchers to challenge conventions and approach problems in entirely new ways.
She believes this freedom is essential for accelerating breakthroughs, from new medicines to advanced materials, and sees SPT Labtech’s instruments as key enablers of a faster, innovative and sustainable future for science.