Today, Astera is opening a call for its first major science residency program, a one-year, fully funded program centered on the creation of public goods. Over the course of the next 12 months, we expect to invite approximately 20 residents to join us in Emeryville, California, where we are building a hub for open science, data and technology. We will provide residents a salary of $125,000-$250,000, commensurate with experience, to explore an important problem of their choosing, along with the opportunity to pitch an additional budget for a team and other operational expenses; a chance to pitch us and others in our network for longer-term, larger-scale support; and access to substantial compute and programmatic resources.
We believe that openness is the key to faster, cheaper, and better innovation, and that many public goods with the potential to broadly increase human flourishing are systematically under-produced by government, academia, and markets. We want to help address these gaps by seeding and supporting a vibrant ecosystem of mission-driven, open projects that can catalyze further private and public sector advancements. We support creative, high-agency scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who are passionate about reducing the barriers to progress within and across domains.
The central organizing principle of the residency is an unwavering commitment to leveraging open science and non-proprietary technology for the public benefit. We recognize that not all problems can be addressed by the creation of public goods, and not all projects can be scaled without proprietary IP. With our residency program, we are simply choosing to focus on the aspects or stages of the vast set of problems facing humanity that can be addressed by such means. Key constraints for our residencies include:
-Open-first: Projects must yield public (open, accessible, nonproprietary) products and research that are unlikely to be created otherwise.
-High-impact: They must have line of sight to generating positive impact on a societal scale (though additional years of work and funding might be necessary). We particularly like projects that have the potential to catalyze government or market funding in new directions.
-“No secret sauce”: Residents must be enthusiastic about openness not only on the project level but on the metascience level, which means making it easy for others to learn both positive and negative lessons from their work.
-Future-focused: Our view is that we are approaching a technological discontinuity, and we prefer projects that will leverage the resulting opportunities or create new ones.
Go to our website to read more about the program and to apply before November 22 https://lnkd.in/griJDJnQ