Astera Institute

Some great ideas in the @asterainstitute essay competition! Thanks to @seemaychou for supporting it. I asked Claude to create a taxonomy of the public goods identified in the essays. These are resources that benefit the field, but not the individuals that create them. As Claude notes, “The reward system pays for novel positive claims, not for the connective tissue that makes the whole enterprise work.” Claude identified seven categories, such as negative results; capturing and documenting tacit and knowledge; the curation of data for reuse and recombination; standards for measurement and protocols; the format of scientific knowledge (e.g. not PDFs, but a machine-readable, queryable cumulative structure); and the ability to identify and pursue collective priorities. This suggests some new directions for what @michael_nielsen and @kanjun have called “metascience as design practice.” What are the tools, institutions, experiments, incentive structures that enable the identification, creation and maintenance of these public goods? How can we learn from the successful and failed efforts of different fields and sub-fields to support these public goods? How might we create new roles – such as the “research software engineers” that develop and maintain software on behalf of different research communities? What if funders explicitly allocated some share of their budgets to public goods? What are the tools that make it easier for people to contribute to these public goods? Link to the Claude summary in the reply.

I have endless admiration for people who, in the middle of scarcity, can think beyond their immediate needs to a radically different future. I think that describes the essayists who submitted to the Astera Essay Competition. You should check out the winning essays. I want to give a special shout out to @_JaeeonLee_, whose essay absolutely nails many of the issues plaguing systems neuroscience: the work unit of a career-defining single paper, the poor coordination across labs, and the lack of a general theory (see his spicy take on IBL). The specific example he chooses—the need for a general theory of dopamine function that explains all the data—certainly seems like an apt target to me. All this said, I don’t believe benchmarks and leaderboards are a one-size-fits-all solution. Terence Tao made a great point in a recent podcast about how new and ultimately correct theories are often initially worse in many ways, and Copernicus's theory of the planets made poorer predictions than Ptolemy's theory. But the observation that in systems neuroscience we need to find a way to work together in a radically new mode, to tackle problems that are bigger than what any one single lab can solve, is something I absolutely believe in. I hope to share my own vision for how we can achieve this at Astera Neuro soon.

Astera's metascience essay competition was very interesting to participate in as a judge. Here's the announcement of the winners, along with a lot of information of broader scientific and metascientific interest

Congrats to the 8 awardees! @pkoo562 @Prashant_Garg_ @_JaeeonLee_ @nivedithasi @MattLeighton5 @ChristinaErnst_ @HarshuMusunuri @shaamilkarim1 5 / 5

We encourage others to give the catalog of ideas a read, and they’re all organized and listed here: astera.org/essay-competit…

We recently launched an essay competition for which scientists described structural problems they run into. With nearly 200 submissions, we decided to give out 8 awards, instead of 3. A quick summary here 👇 1 / 5

Astera Neuro is hiring! Come join our effort to decipher how activity across billions of neurons becomes the conscious experience of the world and ourselves. Senior software engineer: jobs.ashbyhq.com/astera/ab153a3… Senior mechanical engineer: jobs.ashbyhq.com/astera/e5d4b65… @JedMcCaleb @seemaychou @AsteraInstitute

@eichstamm Yes it’s coming! We were held up by a few logistical issues but announcing tomorrow…

@AsteraInstitute On your website, you write "Winners will be announced the week of June 22, 2026." The week is over, but I don't see the announcement anywhere. Did I miss it?

How do we simulate Mars here on Earth? We scrutinized Mars rover data so you don’t have to. 😛 Here’s what it tells us about how to simulate Mars on Earth, and which organisms could grow on Mars! 📄 Report: biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Better models of protein motion mean better tools for understanding disease and designing drugs. And because sampleworks is open from the first commit, anyone can build on it. This is what building science for reuse looks like in practice.

First results show models memorize training structures more than they generalize. Model differences were also revealed, pointing toward new training paradigms for structure-ensemble prediction.

To realize AI for science, we have to change how we feed the machine. sampleworks, the first publication from @radialscience‘s @diffuseproject is a step: an open, modular platform for building and benchmarking structure predictors against experimental data 👇

Reimagining Science for the AI Era. Listen to @beckypferdehirt CEO of Radial @AsteraInstitute discuss the $500M nonprofit seeking to create better conditions for AI in biology. Sponsors: @AlphaSenseInc Dash Bio. timmermanreport.com/2026/06/reimag…

Reimagining Science for the AI Era. Listen to @beckypferdehirt CEO of Radial @AsteraInstitute discuss the $500M nonprofit seeking to create better conditions for AI in biology. Sponsors: @AlphaSenseInc Dash Bio. timmermanreport.com/2026/06/reimag…

Congrats @beccajcarlson @BobbyHollings! Another radically open science effort FTW! More thoughts from @beckypferdehirt @AsteraInstitute here asterainstitute.substack.com/p/radial-suppo…

1/ Despite recent advances in the design of next-generation therapeutic modalities, our ability to deliver those molecules safely and precisely to diseased cells remains a bottleneck. The data to find those cellular addresses doesn't exist yet. Radial at @AsteraInstitute is seeding @deliverome with $5M to build it — openly, at scale, in AI-ready formats.

I am incredibly excited to support @beccajcarlson and @BobbyHollings in building the @deliverome project. Read more about why below 👇