After graduation in 1985, de Grey joined Sinclair Research as an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and software engineer. In 1986, along with SRL colleague Aaron Turner, he co-founded Man-Made Minions Ltd. in order to pursue the development of an automated formal program verifier.[18] At a graduate party in Cambridge, de Grey met fruit fly geneticist Adelaide Carpenter[19] whom he would marry in 1991.[20] Through her, he was introduced to the intersection of biology and programming when her boss needed someone who knew about computers and biology to take over the running of a database on fruit flies.[21] In the early 1990s, he switched fields from AI research to biomedical gerontology, after realising that "biologists by and large were not terribly interested in doing anything about aging".[22] He educated himself in biology by reading journals and textbooks, attending conferences, and being tutored by Professor Carpenter.[23][24] From 1992 to 2006, he was in charge of software development at the university's Genetics Department for the FlyBase genetic database.[25]