New Science September 2022 Updates
New grants and projects.
Organization
Our one-year fellowship begins. Julie Chen and Scott Berger will spend the next 12 months in Stanford and Boston. They will probe the causal role of methylation in aging and explore the evolution of multicellularity (which has popped up independently at least 25 times)! More details soon.
Last week, we hosted a Demo Day in Cambridge. Summer Fellows presented their work and got feedback from local scientists. This event marks the official end of this year’s program. 🎻
Each fellow wrote an essay and technical report about their work. We’ve made the former publicly available on our Substack and website. Full-length research reports will be published soon.
Two summer fellows remain in Cambridge and will continue their projects. Avadhoot Jadhav, in Hidde Ploegh’s lab, will continue building a “universal immunotherapy” using nanobody-peptide fusions. And Diana Leung remains with Xu Zhou; her project explores how cells coordinate and change behaviors when cultured near other cells.
We made a $10,000 grant to Dylan Husmann at Stanford University to study tunable mutation rates.
We made a $35,000 grant to James Heathers to develop software that will semi-automate detection of spurious statistics in research papers.
Projects
We’re building a marketplace to connect scientists with philanthropists. If you have an ambitious idea for a research project but don’t know where to go for funding, please email us. We’ll help you write a 1-page proposal — with only minor requirements — and will consider funding your idea.
We’ve published several pieces on the Substack lately. We think you’ll enjoy:
This history of the Rockefeller Institute’s Natural Sciences division, and how they spearheaded the mid-century revolution in molecular biology.
An essay on cell culture and (missing) context in experiments.
An essay on scientific ‘style,’ and how it went missing from our modern journals.
An upcoming piece on 20th-century pioneers. Keep an eye out! 👀
If you have an essay idea about science or metascience, please email us.
Interesting Jobs
Arcadia Science always has compelling job openings. Applications are still open for their Entrepreneur-in-Residence program.
Lorentz Bio is looking for a Director of Biology to join their founding team.
Jakob Voigt’s Open Ephys (short for open-source electrophysiology) is hiring. They want to make the future of scientific instruments equitable and open.
“Join us to work on high-performance open-source tools that read from and write to the brain. We are looking for an electrical engineer for firmware development, hardware design, and integration with custom ASICs. You will have the opportunity to propose and develop complete projects and will be working on tools that push the boundaries of neuroscientific discovery over the next decade. These tools will be used by thousands of scientists around the world, from those at elite institutions to labs that were previously priced out of the scientific conversation. For inquiries contact jpn@open-ephys.org.”
Stay Frosty,
Niko & Alexey