Our CTO, Manuel Studer, talks about doing experiments in his childhood, what he particularly enjoys doing at imito, and which medical practice he has been supporting with his IT knowledge for 3 decades now.

Manuel, what happened in your life before imito?

I got my hands on computers from an early age, which first led me to studying IT, becoming an application developer, and later turning into a business analyst in cancer research. It was really interesting to soak up everything about this particular topic - I just love learning new things.

Back then, at the pharmaceutical company, I was surrounded by biologists and had to understand in detail what cancer is, how it develops, and how to compare cancer tissues. I sometimes wonder how quickly I could have learned all this if I had been able to use LLMs at that time instead of reading books.

What do you use ChatGPT for the most now?

I rarely use ChatGPT - more often DeepSeek, running locally on my machine because I don’t want to upload our code to the cloud.

I use it when I have ideas to improve our IT architecture or for security checks. Of course, I also use it for writing, research, or helping customers with study design. That are 2 of my main tasks - to contribute to clinical study projects and the further development of our AI. I’m proud that researchers are now approaching us independently and saying, “Hey, we want to do a study.”

The current development fascinates me: we used to have to read tons of documentation - today, you just tell ChatGPT or DeepSeek, “I want to do this thing,” and it immediately suggests what you can try to do the thing. Then you test and adapt - this makes learning even more fun because it’s learning by doing.

From my perspective, the advances in IT have never been as fast as they are now. A new era has begun, and I see the entire progress as very positive.

Which of your tasks at imito really get you into a state of flow?

When I tinker, experiment, and puzzle together how to solve a problem elegantly. There are tons of examples from recent years. Ultimately, it’s “connecting the dots” that I enjoy the most.

This week, for example, I probably spent 3 hours discussing a technical solution with our backend developer Konstantin. And my part is to make sure that the solution is also monetarily interesting and scalable.

That's also the big difference in my everyday life today compared to my time in large pharmaceutical companies. I don't have to ask anyone which services we can use and then spend months discussing them with various stakeholders.

That's the great thing about imito - we can implement ideas quickly. Another example is that I recently created a small tool with our Head of Customer Success, Florian, that automates a previously manual customer support process, basically eliminating it. I really enjoy that.

Have you never had a practical job where you could do puzzles?

A practical, hands-on job, not really - but even before imito, I’ve been “puzzling” together my father’s medical practice for 3 decades - to this day. He’s now 74 years old and still a GP in the village. And he still needs IT support.

People have been asking him for 10 years now whether he has any retirement plans. He doesn’t seem to have any. He probably wants to work as long as he can - simple as that. That’s probably the ultimate indicator that he’s lived his life the right way.

Another way of looking at whether you’ve lived your life the right way is to do again what you enjoyed as a child. Are you doing that?

Yes, indeed. I loved tinkering as a child. What I do now is also something I loved doing as a child. Before I got my first computer at about 12 years old, I had a "Kosmoskasten" and did experiments with it. That also led me to study physics as a minor - alongside my main subject, computer science.

Lastly, who would you like to meet - whether from the present or the past?

There are many, but probably an inventor - someone like Einstein or the scientists behind the Manhattan Project who built the first atomic bombs. I’d be so curious to learn more about the people behind that project and understand them better.

Manuel, thank you for starting imito 9 years ago together with Chrysanth and never stopped tinkering your way through every problem!