Seed, 
by Silver Beach

An effort to bring a completely new talent pool into research.

Scientific progress has become 10x harder than it used to be.

We're trying to solve it by bringing in 100x the number of researchers into the world.

The most fundamental building block of novel research is the people themselves, the academics who do the work. Today, those academics are recruited from a vanishingly small pool of people who have managed to attend elite undergraduate or Master’s-level institutions which allow their students access to research experience at an early stage. This narrows the talent pool massively – we are missing many, many potentially groundbreaking researchers who have not had precisely the life circumstances at an early age necessary to find themselves at an elite graduate program.

We're changing this with Seed.

Follow us on twitter to keep up - Seed starts in March.

How will you get a broader pool in?

We will enable any individual who is able to demonstrate interest and originality of thought, regardless of background or previous academic preparation, to begin engaging with cutting-edge research in fields of their interest. We believe that by exploring the frontier directly, people with the ability to do significant original research can be identified quickly and efficiently through their ability to do novel work with a relatively speedy ramp-up from having no background at all.

Our panel will evaluate applications that take fewer than 20 minutes to fill, and select new comers to research who they think have the potential to work towards substantial progress.

The Silver Beach Institute will fund promising new academics identified via the process described before independently of any advisor or senior researcher, not just in terms of the cost of participating in the program but rather the cost of equipment, materials, compute time, and whatever relevant resources apply to their research.

How will Seed help researchers?

The first version of Seed will

  1. Cover living expenses through a stipend
  2. Connect and pay research mentors for new researchers
  3. Pay for equipment needed to begin the project
We expect all this to provide a lot of value for folks completely new to research, and will only continute providing more value as our community grows.