New faces at Cyclops. This time, a biotech engineer who spent six years at the receiving end of engineering projects and decided he’d rather be at the start of them.

Gregory Van Boeckel joined Cyclops as a Project Manager a few weeks ago. He’s an industrial engineer in biotechnology, he spent the pandemic on a 24/7 shift helping get a COVID vaccine out the door, and he is – by his own admission – annoyingly competitive. 

We sat down with him to talk careers, stock management systems, and the journey that led him to Cyclops. 

A slightly unusual route in 

Gregory’s career didn’t run in a straight line, and he’s the first to say so. “I have a bit of a unique story.” 

After his bachelor’s, he went to work for two years as a lab technician. It didn’t take long to reach a verdict. “It became clear to me pretty quickly that it could be something more. It was too repetitive for me.” 

So he did two things. He went travelling – three months backpacking through Central and South America – and then he went back and finished his master’s, graduating in 2019. 

That September, he started as a consultant with USG Professionals and was placed on a project at Pfizer. He stayed with the same client for six and a half years. 

Two very different projects 

The first played to his lab background: the operational start-up of a brand new chemical laboratory, built to house a workforce running into the hundreds. 

Gregory ran three workstreams. Safety, making sure the lab met every regulation. Documentation and systems, mapping what a move to a new building meant for everything the lab ran on. And the biggest: stock management. 

“In the lab, all the materials, reagents and glassware were reordered manually. I had to roll out an automated stock management system in the new lab.” 

Cabinets with rotating shelves, QR codes on every item, automatic scanning on removal, and minimum stock levels that trigger an order on their own. “That was really my biggest piece there.” 

The second started with a volunteer form. When the pandemic hit and a vaccine entered the pipeline, Gregory put his own name forward. 

“I signed myself up to jump on the COVID train. It seemed super interesting to me.” 

He joined the launch team for roughly five years. The work sat just behind engineering: taking something R&D had made at small scale and proving it could be produced consistently, at quality, at an entirely different volume. 

His take, years later, is remarkably relaxed. “I thought it was great. It was lockdown, everyone was stuck inside, you didn’t have much to do anyway. And we weren’t doing it for nothing.” 
 

Why Cyclops? He wanted the half of the project he never got to see 

Here’s the thread that runs through Gregory’s whole career. 

In his previous role, he always came after engineering. Engineering bought and installed the equipment, commissioning happened, and then Gregory’s team took over. 

“I was involved early in those projects as a stakeholder. And in that respect I always had a lot of interest in: what comes before this?” 

That question turned into a plan. “If I do another project after this, I’d really like to see the other side of the story. I’d like to actually work in engineering and take that part on.” 

“In that respect, I think Cyclops was a very logical choice.”

The thing that actually convinced him: training 

“It came up very quickly that you could actually offer those specialized trainings and deep dives, and that there’s a lot of expertise and knowledge at Cyclops. And that it’s genuinely invested in, monthly training and so on.” 

Then he did Rob’s crash course, and the promise held up. 

“That’s effectively exactly the type of training I always had in my head. That’s the way I want to approach project management and keep learning.” 

Afterwards he went digging through our SharePoint and found the back catalogue: somewhere around fifty to a hundred project management trainings, each a serious deep dive on a single topic. 

“I’m really convinced that I’ve already learned a lot in the time I’ve been here, and that there’s still a great deal more I’ll be able to learn.” 

Outside the office: a competitive all-rounder 

Outside the office: a competitive all-rounder 

Gregory opens the hobby question with a line we’re going to steal. 

“They say project managers are jacks of all trades, they have to be able to do a bit of everything. That applies to me in my free time too.” 

The evidence: football, tennis, padel, athletics, bouldering and skiing, the last one competitively. 

And then there’s travel, which has to be adventurous to count. The benchmark is a long trip he took between jobs: several months across Central and South America, no return ticket, nothing planned. 

“It was just: go with the flow and see where we end up.” At one point that meant landing in a surf village, deciding it was too good to leave, and staying a week to take surf lessons. 

“I’d recommend it to anyone. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.” 

Where he is now 

Gregory currently works in plant engineering at a food manufacturing site, on productivity and sustainability projects. 

Which is a long way from his previous experiences, and exactly the point. He wanted the first half of the story. He’s in it. 

Why this matters to us 

Two things stand out in Gregory’s story. 

The first is that he moved for a very specific reason: he’d spent years watching engineering projects from the phase just after, and he wanted in. People who know precisely what they want to learn next are the people we want to hire. 

The second is what actually closed the deal. Not the salary, not the logo, but the training catalogue. A candidate went looking for evidence that we invest in our project managers, found it, and joined. That’s a standard we intend to keep meeting. 

Welcome to the team, Gregory.