New Science is a 501c3 research nonprofit building the 21st century institutions of basic science. We are doing it by turning the process of doing science into an experiment itself.

Our key operating principles are: being fast, rigorous, and agile. We believe that there are key questions pertaining to how science should be organized that have not yet been conclusively answered, like:

• Should funding be allocated by professional funders (as it’s done in industry) or by scientists themselves (as it’s currently mostly done in academia)?
• When should scientists be opening labs? Should scientists be required to open a lab as a condition for spending their career in academia?
• Should the bulk of science be done by professionals in research institutes or by trainees in universities? If it’s the latter, should trainees (for example, graduate students) be able to hire full-time support staff?

The way we are going to answer these questions is by:

1. Doing experiments in the form of both structured and ad hoc proof-of-concept grants, programs, fellowships, services, and support designed to find highest-leverage ways to unblock research and to address the systemic issues of academia and science.
2. Talking to as many scientists as possible and building a network of the brightest minds both in and outside academia, while identifying and mapping out the entire space of problems facing science.
3. Carrying out metascience research and studying the key scientific organizations that have existed in the past or are currently active.

In its first year, New Science has focused on awarding and running fellowships for early-career researchers working in basic life sciences, funding them, placing them in labs, and comprehensively supporting their projects and their personal growth. Read more about our fellowships and who we fund here, and feel free to reach out if you have ideas for projects for us or if we can be helpful in some way. We are always looking for people who are passionate about pushing the frontiers of science forward.

We are looking forward to running more summer and one-year fellowships, as well as in exploring new fellowship formats and in awarding individual fellowships to scientists at all levels of experience. We are actively looking for more ideas of what we could be doing and we are actively hiring.

We are currently supported by the Survival and Flourishing Fund (funded by Jaan Tallinn, who co-founded Skype), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum), Craig Falls (Jane Street), and other donors.

We are planning to scale our programs by orders of magnitude in the coming years and if you’re interested in supporting our vision, please reach out to alexey@newscience.org.

The board of directors consists of Alexey Guzey, Mark Lutter, and Adam Marblestone. New Science is advised by Tessa Alexanian, George Church, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, Tony Kulesa, Raymond Tonsing, and Elizabeth Yin.

See a profile of New Science and other emerging scientific organizations in The Atlantic.