Map in. Traps out. 地图进，布点出
First-passage maths turned into a product: BioPath takes a site map and a budget and returns where to put the traps — with the proof attached. An Early Career Enterprise Fellowship, a New Enterprise pitch award and a PechaKucha at the Festival of Enterprise.
Fig. 7 — Where to put a trap so that a wandering pest arrives soonest.
Mean time to capture
676 steps
- Greedy optimiser
- 676 steps
- Slowest spot
- 1,052 steps
Proof attached · residual ‖(I−P)T − 1‖∞ = 6.8 × 10⁻¹³
Tap to drop a trap (up to 3) · drag to move · double-tap to remove
So far
- Early Career Enterprise Fellowship
- New Enterprise: DEVELOPMENT award
- Festival of Enterprise PechaKucha
- Careers Service spotlight
The record
A pest wandering a farm is a random walker; a trap is an absorbing target. Where you put the traps decides how soon the pest is caught. That is first-passage maths, and in 2026 it became a product pitch: BioPath — map in, traps out, proof attached.
The Early Career Enterprise Fellowship came first, in December 2025; then a New Enterprise pitch award, a growth cohort, training in teams and funding, and a platform that returns optimal trap coordinates with a proof bundle anyone can re-run.
The story was then told in public three times: a twenty-slide PechaKucha at the Festival of Enterprise, a feature on the university's enterprise blog, and a Careers Service spotlight that begins in a strawberry patch.
Early Career Enterprise Fellow, 2026
An application on 11 December 2025 proposed BioPath, ‘a bio-inspired optimisation tool for precision pest management’ that turns first-passage research into trap-placement software. On 23 December the university's enterprise leadership sent a successful outcome, and the fellowship was accepted the same day — one of twelve Early Career Enterprise Fellows in the 2026 cohort.
Awarded
- Fellows in the 2026 cohort
- 12
New Enterprise: a first pitch award
Accepted onto the Careers Service start-up programme New Enterprise: DEVELOPMENT in January 2026; then weekly workshops, a pitch on 24 February in the Wills Memorial Building, and a £150 award for BioPath on 2 March 2026 — a small first win on the road from theorem to product.
Awarded
- Award
- £150
Learning to pitch in twenty slides
The fellowship came with a training programme run with the university's enterprise partner — building a team, funding and investment — and two rounds of PechaKucha coaching, in May online and in June in person, ahead of the Festival of Enterprise. PechaKucha is unforgiving: twenty slides, twenty seconds each, no going back.
Completed
The BioPath platform: map in, traps out, proof attached
The software behind the fellowship: a Python platform with a command-line tool, an API and a static pitch site. It takes a site map and a monitoring budget and returns trap or sensor coordinates that optimise first-passage capture, together with a proof bundle anyone can re-run — the optimised score against heuristic and random baselines, a robust worst-case score and the Monte Carlo runs behind them. An automated benchmark loop has pushed nearly two thousand benchmark commits on its own, and the pitch site is live.
Introduced as a 2026 Enterprise Fellow
The university's Enterprise & Innovation blog introduced the 2026 cohort of Early Career Enterprise Fellows on 26 February 2026, including a statement on BioPath: a software tool for more precise and sustainable pest management on farms and grain-storage sites, aiming to cut reliance on chemical rodenticides. The post was also featured in that day's bulletin.
Featured
New Enterprise: GROWTH
After the development award, BioPath moved on to the New Enterprise: GROWTH 2025/26 cohort — a series of masterclasses through the spring and a mentor from the university's research and commercialisation team, matched in late March 2026.
Completed
PechaKucha at the Festival of Enterprise
Presented BioPath as a twenty-slide PechaKucha at the University of Bristol Festival of Enterprise in the Arts Complex on 10 June 2026, with a printed poster for the showcase and a one-line promise: ‘Map in. Traps out. Proof attached.’ The talk also lives as a web deck, and that same night an 8 min 58 s pitch video was cut with 135 burned-in bilingual subtitle cues, transcribed by two speech models and corrected against the script. For the fellowship showcase three weeks later, a five-minute pre-recorded version followed.
Presented
‘From strawberry patch to PhD’
The University of Bristol Careers Service published a Student Founder Spotlight on 21 September 2026 — ‘From strawberry patch to PhD: how engineering maths inspired BioPath’ — telling the story of a PhD researcher in Engineering Mathematics building a trap-placement optimisation tool for pest control: from its origin in a strawberry patch, through New Enterprise and the Early Career Enterprise Fellowship, to the Festival of Enterprise.
Published
Evidence ledger
| Date | Item | Status | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Career Enterprise Fellow, 2026 | Awarded | no public link | |
| New Enterprise: a first pitch award | Awarded | no public link | |
| Learning to pitch in twenty slides | Completed | no public link | |
| The BioPath platform: map in, traps out, proof attached | Live | ||
| Introduced as a 2026 Enterprise Fellow | Featured | ||
| New Enterprise: GROWTH | Completed | no public link | |
| PechaKucha at the Festival of Enterprise | Presented | ||
| ‘From strawberry patch to PhD’ | Published |