2026 Essay Competition

An essay competition inviting active scientists from any sector to share concrete research challenges that you hypothesize are caused by broad structural or systemic bottlenecks in science, and experimental strategies to fix them.

Read about our motivation and rationale here.

Open to: Any active scientists

Publish your essay publicly and share the link here by May 1

Winners will be announced by June 15

This competition is an invitation to active scientists to describe a concrete bottleneck in your own research or field that you hypothesize is underlied by systems-level or structural issues that can be addressed. You do not have to have the final solution or be the right person to carry it out. We’re more interested in your hypothesis and whether there’s a tangible pilot or set of experiments that can be run to test it.

And remember, well designed experiments are 1) informative regardless of outcome, and 2) fundamentally capable of failing. We embrace these features. 

We are looking for proposals that:

• ➤ Start from a specific bottleneck in your work or field that you understand well. The more concrete, the better.
• ➤ Explain why this bottleneck is hard or impossible to address within existing structures.
• ➤ Provide a testable hypothesis and potential experiment that can make the challenge addressable one day. What can inform future interventions that we can try out today? We don’t need a final solution, just paths that inform them.
• ➤ Explain why now? Is there a tool or an insight we now have that makes it more possible to solve this today? Or has progress on the issue been stagnant for far too long and should therefore be a priority at this unique moment?

We are not looking for:

• ✘ General frustrations about recent funding cuts
• ✘ High-level takes that are too abstract for an actionable experiment
• ✘ Incremental optimizations that reinforce existing systems or practices
• ✘ Proposals that specifically give your own lab more unrestricted money
• ✘ Expansions of programs whose strengths and weaknesses are already well understood
• ✘ Expensive technologies that would only ever be affordable by a very select few
• ✘ AI tools that merely speed up existing practices
• ✘ A single dataset that you want funding to generate

Some example directions worth exploring (illustrative, not exhaustive):

• A set of tools or technologies that would be enabling for an entire ecosystem, but which require a dedicated organization or professionalized team to build, professionalize, or maintain.
• A shared community resource or infrastructure for which there is no mechanism to maintain or improve.
• A team or organizational structure that existing universities and institutes are structurally unable to support at scale.
• A set of skillsets that you can’t easily engage with for some systematic reason.
• A funding approach matched to a different kind of work: timelines, milestones, or risk profiles that don’t fit standard grants but are essential for a particular line of research
• A training pathway that would produce people with skills today’s system doesn’t reliably produce, but which are crucial for a field’s progress

• Any active scientist is eligible, regardless of formal degree, institutional affiliation, or sector (entrepreneurs and for-profit scientists are encouraged to participate).
• The idea does not need to be something you personally would execute, but someone in the world theoretically should be able to. And you should be able to clearly articulate the hypothesis and why it matters beyond your own work.
• Individuals and teams may submit multiple entries but can win only one prize. For logistical simplicity in the case of team entries, the prize will be awarded to a single designated lead.  
• A core goal of this competition is to catalyze public, constructive dialogue led by scientists. To be eligible, your essay must be posted publicly online before you submit — on your personal website, a lab blog, a newsletter, a public Google Doc, a forum, wherever works for you. Your application is simply an email including the link to your public post. We care about the content of your public essay, not the body of your email. (Note: If your ideas are commercially proprietary, this is likely not a good fit for this competition as we are looking for ideas surrounding basic science and pre-competition public goods.)
• Length: up to the equivalent of 3 single-spaced pages. While this will not be strictly enforced given the range of formats allowed, we will triage substantially longer essays as they are hard to fairly compare with shorter ones.

Submissions will be evaluated by a panel with a mixture of scientific experience and/or an explicit interest in supporting compelling metascience ideas in the future.

Applications will be judged by a panel that includes: Becky Pferdehirt, Prachee Avasthi, Matt Clancy, Michael Nielsen, and Jacob Trefethen

Post your essay publicly, then submit the link using this form

Prizes are a one-time award and not a grant to support future research, study, or services. Acceptance of a prize does not create any employment or contractor relationship with Astera Institute. We are unable to send prize money to individuals residing in countries sanctioned by the United States. (Details here). Anyone currently affiliated with Astera Institute is not eligible to participate. Essays must be posted publicly online and submitted via the application form before the May 1 deadline to be considered. Individuals and teams may submit multiple entries but can win only one prize. In the case of team entries, the prize will be awarded to a single designated lead. All decisions are final and made at the discretion of the judging panel, based on the clarity, depth, practicality, and generalizability of the proposed idea. We reserve the right not to award all prizes if no submission meets our standards, and reserve the right to award additional prizes if the quality of submissions warrants it. Authors retain full ownership over their ideas but grant Astera Institute a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reference the submitted essay with appropriate attribution. Prize awards are considered taxable income.