From Lagos, Lanre Fadire is Reinventing Research Integrity to Combat Scientific Fraud

By Tunmininu Brown

The first time this writer heard Lanre Fadire talk about design, he was not talking about interfaces at all. He was talking about fish. He described standing by a pond at his alma mater, the Landmark University in Nigeria, watching an automated feeder he had built dispense food at precisely timed intervals. The machine worked. The fish ate. Everything functioned exactly as designed; and yet something felt off. The system was correct, but it was not complete. That instinct, that correctness alone is not enough, would quietly shape everything that came next.

When Lanre joined Morressier, a leading platform trusted by research societies to amplify early-stage research, in 2021, he entered a fully distributed company spanning Berlin, South America, and Asia. From Lagos, he learned the real craft of remote collaboration: documenting decisions for teammates he might never meet live, recording Zoom walkthroughs that carried context across sleeping continents, and designing systems that could explain themselves in his absence.

That rhythm suited him. Nothing about his path had ever been conventional. Little over three years earlier, he had been a mechanical engineering student who already sensed he was drifting away from the discipline. The turning point came during his final-year project, when he collaborated with computer science students building an app to monitor pond temperature and fish movement. The fact that the app worked but the UX was clumsy and the attendant data was unusable.

After graduating, Lanre joined SystemSpecs, a Nigerian fintech company, where he began shaping systems meant to survive real-world complexity. What followed was a proving ground, moving on to a technology consulting company Software Business Solutions Consulting (SBSC), he got to work on products for companies like the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS). Keystone Bank. Enterprise CRMs. Nationwide procurement platforms. Systems where failure had consequences.

The opportunities were scarce. Global companies were cautious. African designers were often filtered out before their work could speak. So Lanre treated every opportunity as evidence. He designed systems used by the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System. He built procurement software deployed across all 154 branches of Keystone Bank. He earned a place in the top 3% of designers on Toptal by delivering at scale, under pressure, without spectacle.

In 2021 then came Morressier, and a problem no amount of algorithmic excellence could solve. The company’s research integrity AI could detect fraud with remarkable accuracy; paper mills, manipulated images, fabricated data. Publishers such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers trusted technology but the people tasked with investigating misconduct did not trust the system.

The tool spoke in verdicts; definitive, absolute and ultimately, unusable. Lanre saw it immediately: the tool wasn’t assisting professionals, it was judging them, showing a list of failed checks. In late 2023, he led a cross-functional design sprint that reframed the system’s role entirely. The breakthrough was counterintuitive: the tool needed to become less definitive. Instead of declaring failure, the system surfaced patterns, areas of concern, signals, not sentences. The same intelligence was finally framed for human judgment. The main integrity professionals now trusted the solution because it was simple enough to admit uncertainty. Investigations that once took forty minutes now took ten. User confidence jumped from 3.2 to 8.1 out of 10.

In January 2024, Morressier announced a $16.5M Series B round. The redesigned integrity platform was central to investor confidence. Months later, it earned finalist recognition for the ALPSP Innovation in Publishing Award. But the deeper impact was not financial. Lanre’s work revealed something larger: professionals don’t trust AI that replaces judgment. They trust AI that preserves it.
Research integrity officers live in nuance. They understand context, culture, and ambiguity. Lanre’s design respected that reality instead of flattening it.

Today, Lanre leads design for Morressier’s Research Integrity team, aligning user needs with business strategy and shipping systems that protect the credibility of scientific publishing itself. All of it happens on a schedule that bridges Lagos mornings and Berlin afternoons.

His workspace is minimal. A notebook, pen, whiteboards, Figma. Notion and nothing unnecessary.
Looking ahead, Lanre is expanding into product leadership, advising teams building AI for medicine, law, and finance: domains where confidence without humility can do real harm. Five years from now, he wants to lead design at an organizational level, speak globally, and shape how the industry thinks about intelligent systems.

Given his track record, it’s hard to doubt him. From fish feeders to fraud detection, the through-line is unmistakable: Lanre Fadire builds systems that know when to step back. And in a world racing toward louder, bolder AI, that restraint might be the most radical design choice of all.
Tunmininu Brown is a Product Designer and tech writer based in Lagos, Nigeria.