Applications are open for Astera’s first Residency cohort

Today, Astera is opening a call for its first major science residency program, a one-year, fully funded program centered on the creation of public goods. Over the course of the next 12 months, we expect to invite approximately 20 residents to join us in Emeryville, California, where we are building a hub for open science, data and technology. We will provide residents a salary of $125,000-$250,000, commensurate with experience, to explore an important problem of their choosing, along with the opportunity to pitch an additional budget for a team and other operational expenses; a chance to pitch us and others in our network for longer-term, larger-scale support; and access to substantial compute and programmatic resources (see details below).

We believe that openness is the key to faster, cheaper, and better innovation, and that many public goods with the potential to broadly increase human flourishing are systematically under-produced by government, academia, and markets. We want to help address these gaps by seeding and supporting a vibrant ecosystem of mission-driven, open projects that can catalyze further private- and public-sector advancements. We are looking for creative, high-agency scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who are passionate about reducing the barriers to progress within and across domains. 

About Astera’s residency program

The central organizing principle of Astera’s program is an unwavering commitment to leveraging open science and non-proprietary technology for the public benefit. We recognize that not all problems can be addressed by the creation of public goods, and not all projects can be scaled without proprietary IP. With our residency program, we are choosing to focus on the aspects or stages of the vast set of problems facing humanity that can be addressed by such means.

Key constraints for our residencies include:

• Open-first: Projects must yield public (open, accessible, nonproprietary) products and research that are unlikely to be created otherwise.
• High-impact: They must have line of sight to generating positive impact on a societal scale (though additional years of work and funding might be necessary). We particularly like projects that have the potential to catalyze government or market funding in new directions.
• “No secret sauce”: Residents must be enthusiastic about openness not only on the project level but on the metascience level. This means speeding up re-use and making it easy for others to learn both positive and negative lessons from their work.
• Future-focused: Our view is that we are approaching a technological discontinuity, and we prefer projects that will leverage the resulting opportunities or create new ones.

We want to provide talented people freedom and support to create new pieces of the machinery of science that are adapted to the era of advanced technology that we’re entering. This includes non-proprietary infrastructure, tools, standards, hardware, software, or wetware, as well as pre-commercial fundamental research that can enable progress across a field.

We are unusually agnostic to the kinds of outputs residents choose to pursue: A resident might graduate with a ready-to-launch nonprofit or for-profit company, a more technical de-risked plan for a larger initiative they’d like to pursue, a dataset that critically enables a larger community, or a completed open-source product.

Some examples of people that would make great Astera residents (not exhaustive!): 

• Previous or future start-up founders that want to pursue enabling basic science outside of academia 
• Staff scientists in academia who love building tools and want to do it in a place where this is supported as a priority
• Scientists that have compelling ideas for datasets that would catalyze frontier research without immediate profit potential

We view the opportunity here as one to use open science (in its broadest sense) to drive greater impact than closed science. We intend to focus our support on projects that, if successful, could result in a significant benefit to scientific research or technological development – in speed, cost or quality – beyond the resident’s own project.

What we’re looking for

We are interested in funding ideas where we can see the additional value of our support as compared to academia and industry. Sometimes this will mean supporting projects in underfunded domains; other times it will mean funding stages of research that are not well addressed by existing funders. By contrast, we are less excited about funding areas of research that are already heavily resourced or that are difficult to scale to significant impact.

We are excited to consider applications across a wide range of domains, from metascience to infectious disease to materials science to robotics to energy. We’re including here a few illustrative examples of the types of projects that might be suitable for a residency, along with counterexamples of projects we would not be interested in, in the hope that they will spark ideas in disparate subject matter areas. (We are not soliciting proposals on these specific topics!)

Scientific research example area: Approaches and products designed to help overcome synthetic biology scaling challenges

• Development of new, promising organismal chasses for biomanufacturing
• Engineering of novel fermentation or growth scaling approaches
• Biological research on extremophiles that could be useful for specific applications like biomanufacturing and drug storage
• Counterexample (less interested): proof-of-concept basic protein design work not tethered to impactful application (already well funded)

Data science example area: Tools to accelerate the creation or use of of large open datasets to underpin ML

• ML-based approaches to assist and accelerate the curation of data and methods from research literature and generalist data repositories to yield data in formats consumable by machine learning models
• FLOSS software workspaces, workflows, and analytic methods that would allow scientists to rapidly bootstrap large, public data sets to create new knowledge (bonus points for playing well with Dockstore and using existing community standard workflow languages)
• Counterexamples (less interested): analyzing a specific data set or building a specific ML model; data science software tied to inherently closed infrastructures  

Metascience example area: Tools to ensure rigor in scientific publishing

• Image analysis software that uses ML to detect manipulated images, potentially to be integrated into automated review processes
• Automated tools to review methods and results in papers to flag potential p-hacking, inappropriate statistical tests, and data inconsistencies
• Counterexample (less interested): paying a team of individuals to catch mistakes or fraud in data (not scalable)

What we’re offering to residents

The opportunity for residents includes:

• a salary for one year ($125,000-$250,000, commensurate with experience) to investigate an important problem and potential solutions
• the opportunity to pitch an additional budget for a team and to cover other expenses (e.g. lab, infrastructure, licenses)
• access to substantial compute resources via Voltage Park, a 24,000x H100 cluster
• the opportunity to pitch us on longer-term, larger-scale support following the end of a residency, as well as access to our substantial fundraising networks
• the chance to join a community of exceptionally talented individuals operating in an environment optimized for experimentation, collaboration, and the pursuit of ambitious projects for the benefit of humanity

This program differs substantially from other fellowships and EIRs in giving residents the opportunity to explore foundational research or create public goods that can unlock opportunity areas outside of academia, without an immediate need to translate that research into a profitable product. Provided that everything produced during the course of a residency is open, Astera is unusual in being enthusiastic to support projects at a stage when it is unclear whether they will later turn into nonprofit organizations or for-profit companies, or just become one-off artifacts and goods that exist in the public domain. And we have mechanisms and funding by which we can opt to support all such types of projects after the end of the residency term.

Because our support is intended to promote the creation of public goods for science and technology, it doesn’t come with ordinary strings attached: Astera will not take equity in projects that spin out of the residency in exchange for our financial support (although we may ask for follow-on investment rights). On the flip side, residents will be required to assign to Astera any IP generated during the course of their residency, which Astera will make freely and publicly accessible.

What’s expected of residents

Accountability and performance: Residents will be expected to report out periodically on their progress; however, we encourage residents to structure their own relevant milestones and report-outs to relevant audiences as needed to remain accountable and to get the feedback they need.

Presence in Emeryville, CA: We hope the Astera residency program will serve as a center of gravity for an ecosystem of open science and technology. In order to grow this community, we will require residents to work out of our office in Emeryville, California. We will provide funding and support for relocation and can sponsor visas for international applicants.

Commitment to open science: Residents will be expected to make their final products and key learnings along the way accessible to the public in usable formats that are relevant to the domain. Published deliverables (including null and negative results) should be on accessible platforms; software should be open source; and data should be publicly available and formatted for external use. 

Application process

Ideal candidates are high-agency creators with the ability to identify and tackle challenges needed to conduct a novel program of fundamental research or to launch a tool, service, or platform to address the needs of an identifiable user base. We want to identify collaborative candidates who are eager to help improve and scale science beyond traditional academic communities.

We are sector-agnostic, accepting applications across a wide range of scientific disciplines, as long as the proposed project aligns with our mission to steer science and technology toward an abundant future for all via the creation of public goods.

We expect strong applicants to fall along a continuum between:

• Individuals with a compelling history of entrepreneurial and scientific achievement that have identified a problem area and a rough direction to explore, which may be earlier in development
• Individuals with less history of entrepreneurship who have mature proposals for compelling projects 

This means that high-agency applicants with a track record of executing on ambitious projects are welcome to apply with a relatively undeveloped project idea which is understood to be subject to significant change.

Residents will be selected for a combination of personal fit, their project’s potential for impact, and Astera’s ability to support them in ways other funders will not. We expect to invite approximately 1/4 of applicants to an initial interview based on their written applications, which will in most cases be followed by a technical review by domain experts for those who continue to the next round. We may ask for additional written materials at this stage.

We will guarantee consideration of any applications submitted by November 22 for our inaugural cohort (with start dates in 1Q2025). We will consider applications submitted after that date on a first-come basis until we have filled the cohort. If this page remains active, the call remains open.

To Apply

Apply here. Please make sure to attach a resume and completely answer the application form (see preview below).

All questions other than the first one have a 1000-character limit. If you don’t know the answer to a question or it doesn’t seem applicable to your circumstances, say that. Aim for clear, concise answers – bullet points are fine.

1. Describe the problem you expect your residency to focus on and your proposed solution or direction for identifying a solution. Aim for a level of explanation that a smart college freshman could understand. (3000 characters max)
2. Why did you pick this problem to work on? What’s novel about it?
3. What assumptions about the future of science and technology are baked into your proposal? What are the ways in which those assumptions are most likely to be wrong?
4. Why isn’t this problem likely to be adequately addressed (at this stage) by academia, government, or industry?
5. Who do you envision using your residency’s outputs, and how?
6. How long have you been thinking about this problem? How much progress have you made on it?
7. Do you have a history of involvement in open science or open-source projects?
8. How have you dealt with mistakes or failures in the past? Have you ever failed at something significant in a public way?
9. What is the most impressive (by your own judgment) thing you’ve ever done that would not be obvious from your LinkedIn?
10. What gets you out of bed in the morning?
11. What is the most exciting scientific or technical problem to you other than the one you described above?

Please confirm that you are located in the Bay Area or willing to relocate if selected for this program.