Having celebrated our corporate 25th anniversary in 2013, we are delighted to announce that May 1, 2025, is the 25th “birthday” of our European office at the Pentlands Science Park, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland – home to the famous “Dolly the Sheep” and other scientific enterprises.
However, consistent with our unusual office openings – CSI first operated off the deck of a 50ft Grand Banks wooden motor yacht – we did not start out at the prestigious science park. Instead, our first European office was on a partly restored medieval estate, complete with its own flock of peacocks. As it turned out, the flock’s favorite place to congregate was a courtyard that our office surrounded, and their shrieks were so loud that staff had to schedule their calls and meetings at times when they expected the beautiful, but deafening, birds to be elsewhere!
And that was not the end of the start-up adventures. The office was at a budding research park classified as an agricultural enterprise, and about six months after we were established there, Scotland suffered an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease – which meant that our staff had to decontaminate their cars and shoes before entering or leaving the site.
At that time, we were fortunate to have close ties (and still do) to what was then Inveresk Research Institute (IRI), which Bernalyn had begun visiting when study-monitoring in the mid-1980s. By the time we established CSI, the study personnel we had known were directors, a new IRI campus was being built, and the directors ultimately became owners. IRI subsequently became Charles River Laboratories, and during this time of change they effectively ended their involvement in regulatory consulting, which allowed CSI to pick that up and grow it.
And grow we did. New EU legislation in the Plant Protection and Biocides/Antimicrobials sectors required specific knowledge and expertise, and CSI’s European staff were able to support companies with numerous dossiers leading to market approval for a wide variety of active substances and products in both sectors. To this day, these services remain at the core of our European operation.
When the EU REACH Regulation for industrial chemicals came into force in 2007, CSI was perhaps uniquely placed to offer vital support to dozens of US (and other non-EU) companies faced with brand new regulatory hurdles – and many of these companies have now become loyal and longstanding clients.
More recent times have seen the European office deal with the many challenges of the UK leaving the EU – with ‘Brexit’ instigating the opening of a new satellite office in Dublin, Ireland that allows us to continue to offer many key EU-based services.
Over the years, we blended our cultural differences (speaking English was different from speaking “American!”) into what CSI is as a whole today. With the growth of virtual communications and IT tools, the US and EU sides of CSI have become more integrated, allowing us all to have a more global understanding and outlook. At the heart of CSI, there remains a team of dedicated professionals committed to providing a quality service to all our loyal clients.
Today, with our corporate ownership changes, we have UK as well as US owners continuing to build our future.
Help us celebrate our “second” 25th anniversary!
Bernalyn McGaughey
President / Lead Consultant – Founder Emeritus