A nuclear physician who likes to compile

Dr Babatounde Fréjuste Pinocio Agboton

I am a Beninese physician. I studied at the Faculty of Health Sciences in Cotonou, and it was there, in 2021, that I defended my doctoral thesis. The subject already said a great deal about what would follow: a software tool for hospital accreditation, designed and then tested in two of the city's teaching hospitals. Care and code, from the very start, in the same sentence.

I had taught myself to code on the margins of lecture halls — first out of curiosity, then because a well-framed clinical problem often looks a lot like an engineering one. A little HTML and PHP, then React and Python: nothing academic about it, only nights spent taking things apart and rebuilding them until they held.

A specialty remained to be chosen. I chose nuclear medicine — a discipline that is technical, mathematical, and still rare in the region. It asks you to read an image in the light of physics and arithmetic, and to conclude nothing before you have looked at everything. With no training pathway in Benin at the time, I left to train in Algiers: scintigraphy, PET imaging, iodine-131 therapies — a specialization whose final stretch I am now reaching, in 2026.

In the meantime, I never put the keyboard down. In 2021, with a few fellow doctors, I co-founded Bet'up, a small development studio in Cotonou, and we began building what the medical community lacked: portals for learned societies, conference platforms, management tools. Then came my own products — NucleAtlas, a nuclear-medicine encyclopedia, then KoraKori and Invest-IA on the finance side — designed, coded and run single-handed.

Call me an eternal student, and you would not be entirely wrong: to the specialty I have added two master's degrees, one in biophysics and radiation protection, the other in medical informatics and health information systems. I like that precise place where medicine, physics and software overlap; it is where I do my best work.

My horizon comes down to a few words: to practise in Benin, and to build there tools cut for African realities rather than imported from elsewhere. To treat, and to build what treats better. The rest — the programming language, the diploma, the tech stack — is only a way of getting there.

Download my CV (PDF)PDF · ~2 pages