New Science January 2024 Updates

Jan 31 2024

Sasha here — thank you (reader of this update) for being interested in the activities of New Science, and more generally, in exploring how to create an institution (hopefully many institutions!) of science that will achieve the goals and needs of an ever-changing world of humans, the technologies we develop, and our built + natural environments. 

As of the start of the year, I’m very grateful to continue the work that Alexey has done to get New Science to where it is today, in the role of executive director. 

This month, we: 

• Spent time delineating our deliverables for the quarter and year. One among them is creating a playbook for our fellowship programs and remote-first sharing + project management stack. This will include open resources on how we use Distill, Linear, and Watershed on the infra side. We look forward to feedback on how others use these tools.

• Onboarded several new collaborators + contributors to the New Science team

• Soft-launched our research website (research.newscience.org) — many improvements coming very soon.

Our theme of the year (which arose in consilience between our fellows and internal team) is shipping. Our focus area for the quarter is largely executing on this tooling + collaborations and we expect to have prototypes to share within Q1.

This transition point also seems like a fitting point to review what we’ve done at New Science the past year. Some high points from there —

Our footprint is growing! Collin - Maple Ridge; Dylan, Scott and Julie - Stanford; Diana - Berkeley; Michael - Toronto, Yasmeen - Montreal; Avadhoot - Pune; Adam, Benjamin, Daniel, and Alex - Boston; and Alex - NYC.

In 2023 we expanded beyond the SF Bay Area and Boston science ecosystems and supported fellows located in New York City (Rockefeller), Canada (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) and India (Pune). We’re looking forward to hosting more opportunities like our last ‘Demo Party’ (fellow retreat) to gather face-to-face.

Receiving well-deserved accolades, our one year fellow Scott Berger became an ARCS Foundation Scholar, Avadhoot Jadhav was accepted to begin PhD studies at Karolinska, Adam Strandberg was accepted to PhD studies at Harvard, and Benjamin Chang won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. We could not be prouder and wish them the best for their adventures in these new places.

New starting this year, we have a ~quarterly snail mail update as well (which does not fully overlap the above). If you’re interested in receiving it, please fill out the form here (friends.newscience.org/updates) and we will send it to you.

We will have more information on most of the areas above, namely our progress to date, in February + March and are looking forward to sharing + getting your input. Until then! ❄️

—Sasha 

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Hi everyone,

It's been a huge privilege for me to spend the last several years studying metascience and to run New Science. We've supported many dozens of young scientists with fellowships, grants, and mentorship, published metascience research I'm incredibly proud of, and learned a great deal about how science really works ourselves.

However, having been focused on metascience since 2018, I've come to realize it's time for me to take a break. Next, I’ll be in Boston learning physics — say hi if you’re around!

In light of this, Sasha Targ, New Science's Head of Research is now going to be the Executive Director, assuming the leadership of the organization and its mission. While I am a complete scientific ignoramus, Sasha has a PhD in bioinformatics from UCSF, is a real scientist, and is otherwise better than I am at almost everything. I'm excited to see what she has prepared for science and for New Science in the coming years!

Cheers,

Alexey