Open Science Fellow at Astera Institute

Application deadline: December 31, 2024

From the website:

Astera’s Open Science Fellow program supports dedicated innovators who want to unlock new tools for scientific publishing. Such tools could be new technologies, workflows, or other projects.

Selected fellows will carry out a one-year, full-time fellowship at Astera. In addition to the fellow’s salary, we will consider a proposed budget of up to $350,000 to cover resources for the fellow, including other potential teammates. Open Science Fellows will work to create a spin-out organization or company, and fellows will convene in Berkeley, CA for 4 on-site weeks per year.

In addition to financial support, Astera’s Fellowship program will also provide guidance for fellows as they envision and test actionable, out-of-the-box ideas. In addition to regular meetings with the Program Director, the fellowship consists of cohort calls where fellows share experiences and learn from guest speakers. Periodically, fellows are brought to Berkeley, CA for on-site visits (up to 4 weeks per year) that include strategic planning exercises and networking opportunities. We will connect open science fellows with advisors; we believe that learning and building together with active researchers and open science leaders will be critical for understanding user needs and incorporating historical lessons. We will also help identify team members who can complement the fellow’s skills and experience.

A major goal of the program is to create knowledge about how to make projects in this space successful, so we require fellows to publicly share their learnings as part of a reporting structure.

Who are we looking for?

Ideal candidates are high-agency creators with the ability to identify and tackle challenges needed to launch a tool, service, or platform. We want to identify collaborative candidates who are eager to tackle the challenges of improving and scaling scientific dialogue beyond traditional academic communities. We encourage candidates who bring a unique skillset and are willing to rapidly iterate on the basis of key constraints and user needs.

Ideal projects are at stages of development early enough to preclude support by other mechanisms.

Examples of people who would be qualified to be an Open Science Fellow, including but not limited to:

  • Scientists with a plan to build a tool that accelerates sharing scientific knowledge, and can assemble a team with appropriate technical skills to scale it.
  • Product designers who have an idea for an innovation that will catalyze a new era in scientific information exchange.
  • Software engineers or platform builders who want to open up new possibilities for innovation by reinventing the underlying infrastructure for sharing data and other scientific information.
  • Entrepreneurs with deep user experience and ideas for tools that would lower the barrier to entry and make open science practices easier to adopt.
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