It was a challenge to make happen, and largely made possible through intensive reviews from staff members, but we did complete TA reviews for the course two weeks late. We had to simplify student reviews to primarily rely on the numerical scoring system due to a lack of reviewers. TA and Student acceptance decisions were sent out with a total of 2900 admitted students vs 4000 last year.
Prepod was completed on time for Climate and NeuroAI and came with lots of clear recommendations and action items.
We have been interacting with the Ronin Institute after the announcement of its impending closure. It seems that several scholars are interested in affiliating with Neuromatch to support their grant work in the US.
We are in talks with the Amaranth Foundation, via an introduction from Sean, to support a re-granting program in which we would pass on funds to MILA AI Institute and Champalimaud Foundation, taking a small cut for ourselves.
We completed our Wellcome Matching event where we used our algorithm in a new way: working in partnership with a funder to match grantee LOIs to support collaboration. We used this as supporting data in a talk we gave to 45 program officers from NIH and NSF on government funders using matching.
We finalized a date for the ‘Workshop for Funders on Supporting International Collaborations in Neuroscience”; it will be held on July 22, 2024 in New York. Felix Deku from U Oregon and Sujaya Neupane from MIT will both speak about their international collaborative capacity building programs in Ghana and Nepal respectively.
The marketing and business students working on the Neuromatch rebrand proposal providing their final recommendations in a well-done pitch that covers our business model, pricing, reputation and value propositions and Climatematch/Neuromatch/Sciencematch branding.
Our NSF IUSE proposal was not selected for funding.
We have $185k in the bank, $226k 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.
We had a significant drop in program attendance this year and significant problems with engagement that made it difficult to complete student and TA reviews. Almost all TA reviews were done by a small handful of people and we could not complete students reviews using our normal method, we had to resort to mass reviewing students according to numerical criteria.
We made many improvements to the portal to help with the ‘load balancing’ process of prematching students and TA numbers to help with TA and student selection in the future, which is one of the more time consuming processes of our program.
Since students can apply to multiple courses, our application numbers continue to become a less useful metric to track, and we should likely be focusing on unique student IDs applying as we track live engagement during enrollment and promotion. Though applications were down this year, student offers were even further down with a total of 2900 admitted students vs 4000 last year.
Prepod was completed for both Climatematch and NeuroAI on time and mostly without issue (we had an issue with one applicant who had created duplicate profiles to try to get more prepod payouts). We got good feedback on course structure and content with clear recommendations and to-dos for our curriculum specialists and production teams.
We ran a matching event and process for Wellcome Mental Health grantees to help them collaborate on proposals, but it went only moderately well with only 100 participants (though this is the expected number for Wellcome calls), including several who likely would not qualify for the call, which made match quality relatively poor. We have some clear learning from this on cleaning up or modifying data before the matching process and have special considerations now for open calls.
We gave a talk to a group of 45 program officers from the NIH and NSF on matching for government use for collaborations for scientists in their consortia and interdisciplinary coordination programs. They are interested in a further demonstration and use of this software in their own organized conferences.
Our lead generation strategy of using matching and networking events in the world to demonstrate our other programs had its first clear effect this month. We received a new project proposal from somebody participating in the Wellcome grant call mentioned above. We are about to complete our first R&D project after significant delays caused by University IT.
Bank of America Account: $133,132 USD
Lending Club Account: $52,133 USD
Mercury Account: $88,720 USD
Stripe: $0
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.
We received no additional donor funds or commitments this month.
Our NSF IUSE grant was declined/rejected.
We are in discussions with Amaranth to support a regranting program to Champalimaud and MILA. This would be our first regrant and may be a mechanisms we could support in the future. Champalimaud is seeking a US partner for receiving grants from US individual donors in the future. This will also build our relationship with a new funder (Amaranth) that is looking to invest in NeuroAI.
We have many other grant submissions pending:
Government Grants
NSF CREST Supplement - $27,000 - Pending (Info in May?)
NSF Cybertraining - $750,000 - Pending (May or June?)
NIH - BRAIN Initiative Short Courses - $200,000 - Pending (June or July) (very unlikely now)
Foundation Grants
Tools Competition - $150,000 - Pending (July)
Open AI Addon - $100,000 - Pending (July)
Calbright Implementation Prize - $100,000 - Pending (July)
Connected Minds - $150,000 - Pending
Einstein Foundation - $200,000 - Pending (November)
Simons - $150,000 - Pending (July -> September)
We will continue to pursue foundational funding and evaluate opportunities in government funding. There are limitless government grants to pursue at varying levels of ideal fit.
Current grants of interest include grants for biomedical research workforce training, increasing use of open data, and other education type grants. The grants we are pursuing are visible from our grant-tracker .
No additional earned income this month.
Our main sources of funding for this year will likely be government grants and earned income through R&D partnerships.
Our greatest upcoming costs are new hires and prepod, but we also expect an invoice for $25k from 2i2c.
The unknown of academy finances makes our runway very difficult to figure out. With our projected hires and assuming Academy runs similarly to next year, our out of cash date is somewhere between with a most likely scenario being .
Business Administrator (to help us with finances, taxes, and admin tasks) and Marketing Hire to help promote research partnerships and course.
The marketing and business students who used Neuromatch as a Capstone project completed their recommendations in a final pitch and proposal. Their recommendations were wide spanning and seem well thought out, supported by data and interviews with students, TAs, staff, and neuroscience professors. They will inform aspects of website design, value propositions for our courses, branding for Neuromatch/Climatematch/Sciencematch, and our pricing model. They are providing a final written report which I will summarize next month.