Plasymd Co-Founders Turned Academia.edu Employees Recruiting at UC San Diego Career Fair

Adnan Akil (center) and Kevin Wu (right) 

UC San Diego alumni Adnan Akil and Kevin Wu staffed the academia.edu booth yesterday at the UC San Diego Science and Technology Job and Internship fair. They were busy recruiting software engineers to Academia.edu which describes itself as a platform for academics to share research papers. Akil and Wu landed at Academia.edu by way of a startup they co-founded: a peer-review platform called Plasmyd.

Almost a year ago to the day, the announcement came out that academia.edu acquired Plasmyd. At the time, Akil told pandodaily, “[Academia.edu has] built the largest online community of scientists while we’ve been working on building the next generation tools of peer review,” said Plasmyd’s co-founder Adnan Akil.

Headlines from media reports of the acquisition paint a picture:

CNET Academia.edu acquires Plasmyd to let peers review papers

Venture Beat Academia.edu acquires Plasmyd to bring peer review into the 21st century

Pandodaily: Academia.edu acquires Plasmyd to prove itself to the academy

Akil, a Jacobs Scholar, was a bioengineering major at UC San Diego and went on to UC Irvine for graduate studies in stem cell biology. Wu studied bioinformatics at UC San Diego.

About a year before the acquisition, Tech Crunch wrote this story: Meet Plasmyd, A Search Engine/Discussion Platform Just For Scientists