We hosted our second capstone showcase for the Brains Research Accelerator in May!
The 15 fellows pitched programs on, in no particular order:
Discovering new materials with high-throughput automated labs
Building nano-manipulators for atomic-scale manufacturing
Creating datasets that could unlock precision medicine for neurology
An automated atlas of high-biorisk research
Fixing copper shortages with e-waste
Open-source AI-manipulable CAD software
Electric ammonia production
Diagnosing and preventing age-induced cognitive decline
Preventing the misuse of open-source AI models
High precision atmospheric aerosol and climate models
Automated manufacturing design
Biosurveillance systems to nip outbreaks in the bud
Precision forecasting animal movement
Transmitting electric power directly through the ground
Carbon conductors that could replace copper
You can see the fellows’ profiles and brief descriptions of their program ideas here.
If you or anybody you know would like to connect to any of the fellows or learn more about what they’re working on, feel free to reach out to them directly or contact us at brains@spec.tech.)
These results were a team effort. Thank you to so many people who were critical to the program’s success: the mentors who worked with the fellows, the research leaders who shared their stories, the team who helped run the events, our awesome advisors and ops team, and more.
There are compounding returns to talent programs like Brains: repeated iterations enable us to refine our selection criteria and how we help the fellows; if you can maintain quality, you will build a reputation that both attracts more of the right people and makes it easier for them to be successful; and a growing community of people who have gone through a program create powerful network effects. As such, we plan to run regular cohorts as long as we can, with the next one tentatively kicking off next January.
So:
If you have an ambitious science or technology research idea that is a poor fit for a single academic lab and doesn’t make sense as a startup (or are already working on one), keep your eyes peeled for when we open applications for cohort three!
If you know someone who might be a good fit for the program, please`` route them our way!
If you work at an organization that might want to hire or fund current or future fellows, or support the Brains program itself – please get in touch!
Some tactical meta-lessons
I will do a longer lessons-learned post about the entire cohort soon, but in the meantime I wanted to leave some Tactical Meta-Lessons:
We changed the format from last year and did not do Q&A for each talk. I think this was the right call — it maintained more momentum and let us compress the event into a single day. There was a tradeoff in that it made the audience more passive but I think it was worth it because the topics were so diverse that only a fraction of the audience would have questions for any given speaker and we left copious breaks
Speaking of breaks, copious breaks where people can mingle is critical for any event like this. The reality is that talks are basically teasers for “talk to me during the break.”
In retrospect, the correct videography move is to focus entirely on the speaker, ignore the live slides, and expect to add them back in post. It’s never possible to capture both the speaker and the slides perfectly and video editing has gotten so easy that it makes more sense to put digital slides directly into a digital video instead of needing to go digital → analog → digital.
There is one way to win at any presentation to a non-expert audience about a technical subject: shifting someone’s mindset from “I am not interested in <general topic>” to “wow, that’s really cool.” The way to do this is not to present a lot of evidence for why they should care, but instead to try to teach them something that gives them an “aha!” moment.
Don’t forget — Applications for an AI-focused Brains cohort close June 16th!
Share this post