February 2024
Summary
We launched a new website: www.neuromatch.io that consolidates all of our previous websites into a single one. It also shows off a more unified banner for the org (computational sciences).
TA Pay is going to be partially adjusted to COLA per our pay policy. This was based on feedback from TAs, experience in our Pilot, and a financial analysis.
We have hired Aparajeeta Guha to work on our new research partnership contract. She will receive mentoring from Konstantine in setting up cloud and remote computers and webservers.
Leanna Kalinoswki starts today as a Civic Science Fellow.
Applications open today for our July courses. We are offering Computational Neuroscience, NeuroAI, Deep Learning, and Computational Tools for Climate Science.
We submitted another federal grant this month: NIH BRAIN Initiative Research Education Short Courses. We applied to the Einstein award for research quality.
We have $362k in the bank, $133k in billable (money on grants or contracts we could bill for now), and an additional $1,075,000 in long term accounts receivable (money on grants or contracts for the future). We have $1.8M in submitted grants, $0k in submitted contract bids, and $5M in grants we will submit this month.
Program Updates
Sciencematch
NeuroAI course is basically on track due to the hard work of many people, but especially Xaq and Patrick Mineault. Two days had a delay in recruiting day leads, so are slightly behind, but those dayleads are active and on track.
Scholar Nexus
There was little further development of scholar nexus this month due to poor ability for the team to sync up and Konstantine’s time on critical academy and revenue generating things.
Financial Report
Treasury Review
Bank of America Account: $257,727 USD
Lending Club Account: $15,443 USD
Mercury Account: $88,720 USD
Stripe: $0
TOTAL: $362,006 USD
TOTAL NM SPENDABLE: $273,337 USD
Note: I show Mercury account here for a financial picture overview, but it is not considered in our runway and budget calculations. It is budgeted and managed separately.
Fundraising Status
Received Donor Funds and Commitments
We invoiced NASA this month. Gatsby owes us $50k after we provide them our yearly impact report. We have received clearance to invoice Columbia for the ARNI grant.
In Discussion Donor Funds
We submitted a federal grant this month: NIH BRAIN Initiative Research Education Short Courses. This grant is basically for our existing comp-neuro course, but for adapting it to include BRAIN Initiative data and then supporting the course for five years by paying for all of the computation, Zoom, Airtable, software, etc. The grant doesn’t cover personnel costs. $200,000 over five years.
Fundraising Plans
We are planning to submit a grant to the NIH to be the Common Data Fund Ecosystem Training Center. This would be a five year $5,400,000 grant to support education development in how to access and use open-data resources and data sets for bioinformatics broadly. I’m kind of nervous we won’t get it as the timeline for the grant is super short (announced February, opens March 1, due April 1) and it is not a normal grant (OT “awards” are closer to contracts and don’t have to follow normal rules. Basically, they might have a ‘winner’ already picked).
Earned Income
We received no earned income this month. The pilot course ran at $0 (student fees basically matched TA payments) due to providing a 50% discount to all students for piloting the course.
Financial Projections
Income
Our main sources of funding for this year will likely be government grants and earned income through R&D partnerships.
Major Costs
Our greatest upcoming costs are new hires, but we also expect an invoice for $18k from 2i2c.
Runway
Our runway is much better than it was a few months ago, and our out of cash date is March 2025.
Hiring, Team Changes, and People Updates
Next Hires
Business Administrator (to help me with finances, taxes, and admin tasks) and Marketing Hire.
Other Notifications
I will be on vacation for two weeks in March and completely out of contact with the exception of a talk I am giving to the Open Research Funders Group.