2023/11/30
Summary
This update is a little more content dense than previous ones. A bit more happening this month.
We have selected our final curriculum specialists for the NeuroAI and Climate courses. We have two in Germany and one in Italy, further cementing our global reach and tipping the balance of paid staff to be non-US. With our future civic science fellow and a part time temp hire we will make for another NMDA contract this month, we will have 3 full time and 6 part time staff members.
We are in the middle of building a new website that will attempt to consolidate the many separate websites we built to experiment with different Neuromatch offerings and services. This is a good step that represents the refined focus established in the discussion in our October Board Meeting.
We are doing a southern summer version of our course from January to February that experiments with part time teaching assistants as a way to make the course more affordable, increase the number of senior TAs available, and experiment with having only staff run a course.
We have $210k in the bank, $66k in due invoices or payments we will receive next month, and additional $78k in billable (money on grants or contracts we could bill for now), and an additional $1,550,000 in long term accounts receivable (money on grants or contracts for the future). We have $350k in submitted grants and $1,500,000 in grants we will submit in the next quarter.
Program Updates
Sciencematch
More volunteer roles have opened for academy teams and many have been filled. We have an awesome roster of amazing talent, both new and old. This includes the new ‘course director’ roles, curriculum roles, and project roles.
The NeuroAI course is beginning to take final shape as a two week course. We are securing some awesome dayleads and senior volunteer roles.
We have settled on course dates for the teaching methods pilot course, which will be on Jan 22 to Feb 09, 2024. We will enroll a limited number of students with a limited number of TAs that work part time instead of full time.
We are running a global matchmaking event in Q1 2024. You can see the website here: matching.neuromatch.io . We recently completed our matchmaking event for the American Society for Cell Biology. It went really well and they really enjoyed it. We are in discussions with CAMERA, a consortium of African neuroscientists that are looking at a way to better match students to mentors.
The Climate Impact Scholar program continues and it seems most teams are staying engaged. We are excited to use this as a model for future longer-term project work at Neuromatch.
Scholar Nexus
Gunnar has secured some significant interest from his library and Lyrasis has renewed interest in funding this. Discussions with Lisa Yang are still underway but look very promising. It is likely we will see a significant funding shift in the next several months.
Financial Report
Treasury Review
Bank of America Account: $74,138 USD
Lending Club Account: $47,759 USD
Mercury Account: $88,720 USD
Stripe: $0
TOTAL: $210,617 USD
TOTAL NM SPENDABLE: $121,897 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 received 25,000 CAD from CIFAR to support international training in our Academy. We have successfully invoiced Meta, but are having difficulties with Deepmind still due to outdated accounts in Ariba.
In Discussion Donor Funds
I met with almost every single one of our donors in October and received mostly good news. It seems likely that we will secure a Simons donation in early spring to support Academy, and we have interest from NSF and Parkinson’s Foundation.
We have $200,000 of submitted grants to the Tools Competition to advance our algorithms for matchmaking, science networking, and create tools that can monitor our classrooms for group participation and submit reports when students aren’t participating.
Most of our in-discussion donor funds are actually federal grants we are working on. We are working on CyberTraining, Innovations in Graduate Education, RITEL, Improving Undergraduate STEM Education, an IES Grant for collaborative learning, and the Climate Ocean Workforce Grant. We have stopped pursuing the Advances in Informal STEM Education grant because it is too focused on citizen science.
We submitted a CREST Supplement in Partnership with the CREST DMAP Center at Georgia State. They ended up taking a larger cut of the grant than anticipated (we end up with $27,000), but much of their cut is to support student attendance at Academy, so it will come back to us and most likely take the form of the partnership agreements that we had thought about piloting.
Fundraising Plans
We are also finally getting an introduction to the Heising-Simons foundation, the climate science side of the Simons foundation.
I met with NSF at Society for Neuroscience and they were incredibly impressed and excited about our approach to mentor matching, collaborator finding, and our general approach to scalable education. They supported our idea in being a partner for broader impacts work and they were considering writing a call geared towards us for creating a good way to match scientists with summer fellowship and research experiences, specifically for diversity supplements and work.
Earned Income
We invoiced ASCB and have mostly solid plans for another NMDA contract starting in December.
Financial Projections
Earned Income
We have $170,000 in Research and Development contracts for software and science and $1,000,000 in contracts for education development.
Donations
We have $100k pending from Gatsby and $32k in AR for Meta and Deepmind.
Major Costs
Our greatest upcoming costs are new hires, but we also expect an invoice for $8k from 2i2c, $4k from Lyrasis, and it is possible that our experiment in the southern hemisphere pilot will run negative at up to a few thousand dollars.
Runway
While our predicted cash situation has improved, slightly more expensive than predicted curriculum specialists, our Lyrasis invoice, and potential negatives on the pilot program have brought our runway to October 2024.
Hiring, Team Changes, and People Updates
Next Hires
Curriculum specialists for Neuro/AI and climate science. Fellow for Civic Science Program. Data Scientists and cloud service contractors for NMDA.
Other Notifications
We signed up for a ORCID and Lyrasis membership which will allow us to write volunteer experiences to ORCID profiles.