Meet MyScientist: Your AI-powered application expert

Labs across the world tell us about the same challenges: method development, troubleshooting, results validation, onboarding, and more. Your in-house experts know how to answer these questions, but their time is limited. While teams wait for answers, projects lose momentum and instruments sit idle.

General-purpose AI tools promise to clear that bottleneck. But when any error can cost weeks, teams still have to spend time checking the answers.

That’s why we built MyScientist: an AI-powered application expert that eliminates the wait.

What is MyScientist?

MyScientist is an AI-powered application expert that provides specialized support for Malvern Panalytical products. It puts expert-level guidance directly in operators’ hands, resolving application queries in minutes and accelerating decision-making.

Built as a narrow large language model (LLM), MyScientist covers one domain – Malvern Panalytical instruments – in depth. It’s trained on only curated documents authored by Malvern Panalytical’s scientific experts.

The tool is currently available for use with our Mastersizer 3000+ and Zetasizer Advance ranges, with support for more instruments to come in 2027.

“MyScientist lowers the barrier of access to expert-level domain knowledge.”

Jonathan Mehtala, PhD, AI Applications Lead at Malvern Panalytical

What makes MyScientist better than other LLMs?

Rather than give generic advice that could overlook instrument-specific nuances (with costly results), MyScientist gives operators application guidance they can act on immediately. This is made possible by four key factors:

1. Specialized training data

Broad LLMs like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of publicly available data, of varying quality. This makes them less reliable for instrument-specific details. MyScientist, by contrast, was trained only on curated, expert-authored material. That includes over 250 documents like product manuals, user guides, technical notes, white papers, patents, training videos, and FAQs.

Its guidance reflects how Malvern Panalytical instruments actually work, and the current versions were tested by Malvern Panalytical scientists with over 175 years’ combined experience.

2. 97% accuracy vs. <70% for general-purpose AI

When we asked ChatGPT and MyScientist the same questions, ChatGPT gave acceptable answers <70% of the time. This was comparable to the alpha version of MyScientist, trained only on publicly available materials, such as manuals and application notes. But training on expert-authored training material and further testing took its performance to above 97% accuracy.

During the testing process, we used ten “golden” Mastersizer questions as an internal benchmark. MyScientist answered all ten correctly. The free version of ChatGPT answered three correctly, two correctly but incompletely, and five wrong.

3. Rigorous internal testing

MyScientist’s 97% accuracy performance was made possible by repeated rounds of testing and refinement. During extensive alpha and beta testing, scientists around the world – from those in their first year to a principal scientist with over 25 years’ experience – asked more than 600 technical questions.

Whenever MyScientist gave a less-than-perfect answer, the team addressed it and added the correction to the training material, alongside new expert-authored content. MyScientist was retested after each round until its performance surpassed 97% on expanded benchmark tests of 40–100 questions.

4. Detailed references with every answer

No more LLM references pointing to irrelevant websites: every MyScientist answer links directly to its source document. A PDF preview shows you the relevant text in context, so you can check the guidance against the source for yourself. You can also download the full document from the MyScientist website.

How can I use MyScientist?

MyScientist’s expert-level guidance can be accessed at any time from the web portal. Simply type in your question and get an answer in seconds, along with clear citations and the confidence to move forward knowing the advice is backed by technical expertise.

With the premium version, available to all users for free until December 31st 2026, you can ask MyScientist unlimited questions. From practical questions about results interpretation or the best measurement cells to use with your instrument, to bigger questions about measurement principles and method development, MyScientist can handle it all.

What are MyScientist users saying?

An experienced Mastersizer 3000+ customer who tested the beta version of MyScientist says, “If we’d had MyScientist last year, we would’ve caught mistakes earlier, saving us at least six weeks of re-method development work.”

In an industry like drug development, where lab costs, sample costs, and scientists’ time add up quickly, those six weeks could be worth millions.

Explore MyScientist for free now

This is just the start for MyScientist. In the near term, we’re adding:

• Integration with Malvern Panalytical software, the Support Portal, and MyStore
• Real-time method development and results monitoring
• The ability to upload raw data files – or even photos of them
• More instruments

Get ready to experience decision-ready guidance at your fingertips. Learn more here: MyScientist