News
What Scientists Said: Results from Astera’s First Essay Competition
Astera recently hosted its first essay competition, focused around metascience. This competition was always more about starting a conversation than finding a bunch of perfect solutions. We wanted to hear from working researchers, not policy experts or administrators, about the structural problems they actually run into, described concretely enough that someone could do something about […]
The Data Problem Killing Drug Discovery
Pat Walters | Chief Scientist, OpenADMET
Radial Supports The Deliverome Project
Building the missing data layer for precision medicine delivery
Spinning a new future with programmable fibers
Proteins are the programmable manufacturing material of the future.
Mapping the path to one cent electricity
A new Astera Resident investigates not just how transformative fusion could be, but what would have to be true to get there.
Announcing Radial, Astera’s new life sciences division
Today, Astera Institute is launching Radial, a division which reimagines how life sciences research happens at a systems level. Radial will be led by Becky Pferdehirt as CEO. We are committing up to $500M over the next decade to expand our build-test-learn approach to scientific infrastructure and practices. How we fund, do, and build upon […]
Identifying Systemic Bottlenecks to Science
Today, alongside the launch of Radial, we are opening an essay competition that I’ve been ruminating on for some time. Namely, inviting active scientists from any sector to share concrete research challenges that can inform our future work at Astera. We’re interested in your hypotheses about what broad structural or systemic issues contribute to the bottlenecks you […]
Dileep George joins Astera to lead its neuro-inspired AGI effort
Dileep George is joining Astera as Head of AI, leading our AGI research division. Working alongside our Chief Scientist Doris Tsao, he and the team will explore novel, brain-inspired computational architectures to accelerate the development of safe, efficient and aligned AGI. Astera will continue to support this effort with over $1 billion in committed resources […]
Sharpening Astera’s focus
Important science and technology development often falls through the cracks of public funding and private markets, i.e. work that may be high impact but risky, requires long timelines, or involves unpopular ideas. These areas are ripe for philanthropy. And as AI ushers civilization toward an event horizon, we need more people working on the hardest […]