Astera Institute

We’re so excited to welcome Kyle McEneaney to Astera’s growing team. Kyle joins us with a unique perspective on philanthropy and change, with previous roles leading work in digital infrastructure and climate technology at Schmidt Futures, and with a background in deploying technology in emerging markets. At Astera, Kyle will drive our strategy for catalytic philanthropy in science and technology. In our most recent Substack post, Kyle shares his perspective on philanthropic investing and why it matters for Astera’s mission: “We have two very good engines for scaling and distributing “good things” in the world (however we define those things): markets and governments. If those “good things” can generate equivalent value for a lower cost as compared to alternatives—or, better yet, create new value—markets will deploy them widely and quickly. And for their part, governments can organize and shape markets, operate at large scale, and allocate resources to things that create value for society, but insufficient capturable value for markets (e.g. health for lower-income populations; last-mile postal or internet service, or electricity; basic research; etc). But markets and governments have some limitations that can prevent them from scaling good things well, or quickly. Market actors are constrained by time horizons, opportunity costs, and economic incentive structures, and do not necessarily allocate to “good” things. And governments are slow to act, risk averse, and constrained by bureaucracy and political incentive structures. This is a very compelling opportunity for philanthropy: to mobilize the far greater resources in markets and government toward scaling good things by altering incentives and/or filling gaps those other actors by their nature cannot.” Read more on Substack https://lnkd.in/gi6sqn9J

We’re thrilled to announce that John Wilbanks is joining Astera as our first Head of Data. Formerly the Head of Data at Biogen Digital Health and Head of Product at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, John joins Astera with a bold vision for how open data advances science. Wilbanks has been a key figure in Open Science for more than two decades through his leadership as Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, VP of Science at Creative Commons, and as a co-founder of the Access2Research campaign for public access to publicly funded data and literature. In his new role, John will bolster Astera’s commitment to developing large, open datasets to catalyze scientific advances. “Open Science can be enzymatic,” John said in a recent Q&A, “high-quality and intentionally sourced data make discovery go faster, especially when those data are public.” Read the full Q&A about John’s vision on the Astera Substack, Human Readable: https://lnkd.in/g3x4QSk3