A co-created newsletter of resources and actions for climate biotech
Hello Climate Biotech Friends!
Today is a special day: We are publishing over 60 proposals from Homeworld’s first Garden Grants program focused on protein engineering. Our novel approach is an experiment to see what happens when climate biotech researchers around the world say are the most important problems to work on. So while the problem statements are public, the solutions themselves are confidential. Our vision here is that this openness facilitates new collaborations and increases philanthropic funding into climate biotech.
Homeworld thanks the Experiment.com team, especially Denny Luan and David Lang (who is also a Homeworld Advisor), for being incredible partners and collaborators that helped bring Garden Grants to life. Beyond “just” providing the leading software platform that has funded 1,200 projects, Denny and David have been active mentors and guides. You can see Denny’s interview with Homeworld Co-Founder Dan Goodwin on the Experiment.com blog. We also want to thank Isha Datar and Bre Duffy from New Harvest for sharing their field-building expertise and gold-standard processes.
Following the success of the Homeworld Ideas Writing Challenge (133 submissions!), we co-launched the Ideas Matter Writing Fellowship with Niko McCarty and PillarVC. The deadline is October 30, and we’ve been blown away by the level of interest. If you are looking to level-up your writing with a tight group of peers in January, you can apply here.
While there is much to be excited about, we must also acknowledge serious events that touch many of us. Because no statement can be a statement of its own, nor can we ignore the horrific violence in the Middle East, we at Homeworld want to be clear that we commit to giving our absolute best to EVERYBODY in the climate biotech community. Homeworld may look at the macro picture for climate but we look to the microscale for human interaction. It’s Homeworld’s mission to support the growth of the climate biotech community, and we will continue to focus on the growth of each individual we touch, regardless of background, religion, gender, or any other aspect of themselves.
Jobs, Funding, & Opportunities
Funding ($ looking for projects)
- Announcing the $7B Hydrogen Hub from the DoE, Forbes (h/t Hassan Kane)
- “Call for Letters of Inquiry: Interdisciplinary Social and Natural Science Research Projects on Critical Minerals and Metals in the United States”, $500-750k opportunity from Sloan Foundation due December 18 (h/t Diane Matar)
- Open call for proposals on biotech in mining by mining major BHP, via Think and Act Differently. Provides mine access and support for translational research in addition to funding. Due Dec 6.
- Activate Fellowship due October 31
- Breakthrough Energy Fellowship, due November 8
Funding (Projects looking for $)
- Ángel Rodríguez, Fellow at Science for America, is seeking $85k to Retrofit 600,000 sqft of commercial space outside Boston (Calor Industries)
- Dr. Jason B. Thomas, Founder at Pennycress, is looking for a co-founder and funders.
- Dr. Floris Engelhardt, Founder/CEO at Kano, is raising seed funding to expand manufacturing and design of single stranded DNA, and also seeking research partnerships in biomanufacturing and plant engineering (KanoTx)
- Brian Sefton, CEO of Sirius Bio, is raising a seed round for AI to optimize biomanufacturing for non-model organisms (Sirius.Bio)
Opportunities
- Ideas Matter Writing Fellowship with Niko McCarty, PillarVC, and Homeworld Collective.
Job postings
- Diligence Lead, Frontier Carbon Removal (h/t Judy Savitskaya)
- Greenhouse Gas Removal Manager, Bezos Earth Fund (h/t Jonathan Lipman at Speed and Scale)
- Biotechnologist at Amnesty International, link
- (Senior) Lead Machine Learning Scientist, Hippo Harvest (h/t Adam Riesselman)
- Community Project Manager for Open Datasets Initiative, Align to Innovate (h/t Pete Kelly)
- Head of Comp Bio & Senior Scientist in plant traits and microbiology at AranaBio
- Founder, Critical Minerals focus newco, Marble (h/t Benjamin Tincq)
- Several engineering roles, mainly electrical engineering and computer science for an eDNA sampler product, Aquatic Labs (h/t Lauren Zarama)
- Program Director for climate biotech incubator, Climate Capital
- LiquidTrees (formerly 1010 Solutions) is hiring for a host of roles doing frugal carbon capture science in polluted rivers in Brazil and India
- Postdoc position in microbially-enhanced rock weathering and biomineralization in Buz Barstow’s lab at Cornell (reach out to Buz)
- Founder in Residence in Enabling Native Pollinators for Sustainable Agriculture at Deep Science Ventures
Research & News
Technical Resources
- “From Research to Reality: Key Takeaways from Our STEM Talent Transition Workshop”, Work on Climate (h/t Inbal Nachman)
- Nanopore translocates full proteins, GenEng News (h/t PillarVC’s newsletter)
- SAF primer, Carbon Direct (h/t Parikshit Sharma)
- Review on C1-trophic organisms toward a circular bioeconomy, Nature Comms (h/t Paul Reginato)
- Chimeras of Photosystem I and hydrogenase to use light to drive hydrogenase activity, Adv. Energy Materials (h/t Aidin Balo)
- Eight up-and-coming biotech tools to combat the climate crisis, Microorganisms (h/t Dan Goodwin)
- “A nitrogenase-like enzyme system catalyzes methionine, ethylene, and methane biogenesis,” Science
- “ATP production from electricity with a new-tonature electrobiological module”, Joule (h/t David Kim and Pooya Naghshbandi)
- “Thousands of programmable DNA-cutters found in algae, snails, and other organisms,” MIT McGovern Institute (h/t Omar Abudayyeh and Jonathan Gootenberg)
- Link between BPA and autism published, Rowan University
- “Atmospheric implications of increased Hydrogen use”, University of Reading (h/t Paige Brocidiacono)
- “DSEMR: A database for special environment microorganisms resource and associating them with synthetic biological parts”, Synthetic and Systems Biotech (h/t Dan Goodwin)
- Critical Minerals and Materials, US Department of Energy
- Innovation for a Cool Earth roadmap for applying AI to climate, ICEF
- Model-based scenarios for net negative emissions in the food system, PLOS (h/t Arjun Khakar)
- “Engineering Strategies to Boost Crop Productivity by Cutting Respiratory Carbon Loss”, The Plant Cell (h/t Chris Eiben)
- “Global warming increases the chance of success of maize-wheat double cropping in Europe” Research Square (h/t Jonathan Burnbaum)
Blog posts
- Angela Son’s article: “Introducing the Green Collar Workforce series: A thorny question and a rosy opportunity – who is going to solve climate change? ”(not directly biotech but close if you’re bullish the economy)
- Important Problems Lead to Important Work by Daniel Goodwin
Inspiration – Motivation through art and beauty
- Conversation with marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on the On Being Podcast discussing optimism based on our capability and potential: “What if we got it right?”
- Climate futurism exhibition from Pioneer Works also curated by Ayana, on the same topic as the podcast above.
- Zooming around an animation of a 3D bacterial cell rendered at a single-protein level, Tim Davidson on X.
We believe in the power of our community, and our newsletter aims to showcase this. So many people are doing amazing work towards climate, sustainability, and planetary health. Thank you to everyone who submitted the ideas and inspirations which created this issue.
If you have any feedback, insight, or just want to say hello, please connect with us!
hello@homeworld.bio
@HomeworldBio