Thanks a lot for your advice, this is great. Former academics / PhDs are good pool of people with wonderful skills (I didn't finish my own PhD, but I know the environment). Some PhDs might hopefully also be more attuned to the social problems like the ones we are looking into, so we will definitely be considering that.

The challenge we could have is more on looking for usability and frontend expertise, considering the type of tools we want to build, and these are not necessarily in the programming skillset you grow during a PhD (generally more about data analysis / engineering, but of course it depends on the line of work).

Anyways, thanks for the suggesting though.