# Lead Researcher

> A lead agent writes a research plan and fans out parallel sub-agents for breadth-first information gathering — then merges their findings into a synthesized answer.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Multi-Agent
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/lead_researcher/

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## Description
**Intent**: A lead agent writes a research plan and dispatches parallel sub-agents that fan out for breadth-first information gathering, then merges results.
**Context**: Open-ended research tasks — market briefs, competitive intelligence, literature reviews — benefit from breadth-first exploration across many sources rather than depth-first reasoning along one thread. A deadline of hours, not days, makes serial search a bottleneck.
**Solution**: Lead agent receives the user query, plans a set of parallel research questions, and dispatches each to a sub-agent. Each sub-agent searches independently and returns structured findings to the lead. The lead synthesizes the answer; if synthesis reveals gaps, it spawns additional targeted sub-agents.



## Use Cases
- Research-shaped tasks benefit from breadth-first parallel sub-agents across diverse sources.
- A lead can plan, dispatch, and synthesize findings rather than execute serially.
- Source diversity matters and a single agent's serial search would be a bottleneck.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Breadth-first parallelism cuts wall-clock time dramatically on research tasks.

- The lead's scratchpad (research plan + gap analysis) makes the research process auditable.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Sub-agent overlap and redundancy — multiple agents may search the same sources.

- Synthesis becomes the new bottleneck when the lead must reconcile many contradictory findings.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/lead-researcher/)