Impact

I became a New Science fellow during the first year of my PhD. So, I took a short sabbatical to pursue a crazy ambitious summer project with absolute intellectual independence.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't crank out an instant Nature paper — I struggled! It was basically a battlefield promotion to PI, in miniature: spinning up a totally new research program in a new city, with total control over my agenda, and total accountability to seek out the support and collaborations I needed.

New Science was a fever dream that made me a better, braver, more fiercely independent scientist. I wish I could do it again.

The New Science fellowship was really productive for me. It was incredibly helpful to spend a couple months learning how to set everything up from scratch - the materials, the bench, everything. The way really high-impact labs work is you have your own project and you're pretty independent, but I didn't have a real project of my own in my thesis lab. Going through this mini project through New Science was perfect practice for that.

What I'm doing now isn't quite what I was doing during the fellowship, but I'm pursuing all the same interests just in a different context. It would have been a lot harder for me to both realize what I'm interested in and switch to a different model system if I hadn't done the New Science fellowship. There was no lab around me and I got really confident that this is what I truly wanted to do. In a normal lab you just pick among existing projects and you never really learn what your true interests are. So building that confidence to work independently was huge for me.

I'm definitely glad I did it. It was really important for my development as a scientist. Without having tried to do something completely on my own, I would've done something way less interesting now.

New Science opened up a whole world of brilliant, unconventional thinkers for me. Through direct introductions from the fellowship, I met some of the most interesting, weirdest, and most innovative minds in Boston.

Compared to something like the Hertz fellowship which optimizes for prestige, New Science straight up optimizes for brilliant outliers. I've noticed that the stamp of approval for New Science fellows to do ambitious, unconventional research was really important, especially since young researchers usually face so much pressure to conform.

I would've never come to Boston without New Science's help, and the only reason I'm in grad school is because of mentorship from New Science's executive director. The introductions to great people, coaching, professors, and research opportunities have been incredibly valuable.

New Science had a huge impact on my research trajectory. Prior to the fellowship, I had applied to graduate school and didn't get a single interview. New Science's grant enabled me to become an independent researcher in Ethan Garner's lab at Harvard, where I got to lead my own project and connect with other researchers.

And before that, Alexey's encouragement to follow my passion for biology research gave me the confidence to leave my software engineering job and pursue science full-time.