Digital Science Catalyst Grant Awarded to TetraScience

One of Digital Science’s main goals is to jumpstart innovation in the research community. Working towards this goal we run the Catalyst Grant Program,  an international initiative to support the innovation of new software tools and technologies for scientific research.

Awards of up to $25,000 are intended to provide initial support to take ideas from concept to prototype and to-date we have awarded more than $100,000 in grants. Awards are considered twice per year, once in December and once in May, and today we are thrilled to announce December’s Catalyst Grant awardee.

Without further adieu, we’d like to congratulate TetraScience, an open Internet-of-Things start-up aiming to accelerate the pace of scientific research, who have been awarded December’s $25,000 grant.

More about TetraScience 

Founded by a team of serial entrepreneurs from Harvard & MIT, TetraScience is a Boston-based technology company building an open Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform to enhance productivity, safety and reproducibility. By combining wi-fi connected tools and a cloud-based software platform, scientists can monitor and control their experiments from anywhere and upload the data directly to the cloud, thereby accelerating the research process.

Amy Brand, Digital Science’s VP of North America explains:

“We had dozens of extremely strong submissions for this round. It was a tough decision, but TetraScience stood out for the quality of its core concept, team, and presentation. We’re proud to have a role in helping launch an Internet-of-Things for scientific experimentation.”

Alok Tayi, TetraScience co-founder and CEO adds:

“TetraScience is honored to receive Digital Science’s prestigious Catalyst Grant Program award.  This funding enables us to pursue our vision of a cloud-based laboratory that can dramatically accelerate scientific discovery.  Additionally, we see this award as an opportunity to collaborate with the Digital Science team and portfolio companies based in Boston’s Kendall Square. The Catalyst Grant award is the beginning of a promising partnership between TetraScience and Digital Science.”

The goal of the grant is to help an inventor grow an idea from concept to prototype and to work with Digital Science to refine, develop and promote innovations in the wider scientific and technology communities in which it operates.

We are really excited to add TetraScience to the growing list of grantees which so far includes:

• Michael Schmidt, Nutonian   

Creating a Robotic Scientist to See Patterns in Massive Data Sets

According to Michael Schmidt, CEO at Nutonian, Inc. and a former researcher at Cornell University, we often take the massive complexity in the world for granted. That’s why Schmidt is working on a new direction in artificial intelligence – the creation of a “robotic scientist” that can identify patterns in massive data sets unseen to the human eye. He and his team at Nutonian have set out to map the world’s data sets, calling it the “data genome project”. The goal is to collect one million data sets in the first year, analyze them in the cloud, find out what hidden equations lie in them and link them together. This innovative process will reveal road markers that will allow scientists to look back and see what they say about science and data in general. Schmidt says that “the Catalyst Grant Program has been instrumental, and that we wouldn’t have been able to do the project without it”.

• Reuben Robbins, Grantee

Transforming neurocognitive research through technology

Reuben Robbins, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, studies the neurocognitive aspects of HIV through research and neurological testing that requires extensive manual processing. Robbins realized that the interactive nature of the electronic touchscreen could reduce most of the manual processing and an online database could make test results available to his peers globally – transforming research in the field. The new platform affords clinicians instant results and eliminates manual processing to save time and ensure consistency. According to Robbins, funding typically comes through the federal government and is a slow process. “The Catalyst Grant is intellectual and emotional support with fast and flexible funding.” 

• Nathan Jenkins and Alberto Pepe, Authorea

Dynamic content and data-driven figures for scholarly papers  

Nathan Jenkins and Alberto Pepe, of the University of Geneva and Harvard University respectively, cofounded Authorea to bring the modern capabilities of the Web to the previously staid world of scholarly publishing. The Web at some level has transformed most mediums, but the scholarly paper has remained a mostly static document, until now. Authorea allows researchers to dynamically present insights and collaborate on research data in real-time, and gives readers the ability to interact with source data directly. For the first time, scientists will be able to not only read a scholarly piece, but easily understand how the researchers came to their conclusions based on the data, and use it themselves in future studies.

If you want to apply for May’s Catalyst Grant, see here for all of the information.