Results for “cohort” 216 found
Emergent Ventures Africa and African diaspora, first cohort
Saron Berhane, Australian-Ethiopian living in Ghana, for research in synthetic biology (bio-leather produced using microbes). Previously she was the co-founder of an agriculture technology startup that specializes in real-time airborne disease detection.
Emmanuel Nnadi, Nigerian microbiologist and lecturer at Plateau State University in Bokkos, for research on phage therapies and the development of a phage bank in Nigeria.
Dithapelo Medupe, Botswana medical doctor and Anthropology PhD candidate at UPenn, to support her research on statistical approaches to multilinear evolution in African development and for general career development.
Mercy Muwanguzi, Ugandan high school senior, to support her research on robotics design and development for medical purposes in Kampala. She was jointly awarded the President’s Innovation Award for Science and Innovation.
Nseabasi Akpan, a professional photographer from Ibadan, for promoting photography education to young people in Nigeria.
Colin Clarke, an Astrophysics undergrad in Ireland, for travel to Nairobi to assist in providing astronomy education to rural schools in Kenya with a non-profit called the Travelling Telescope.
Geraud Neema, Congolese policy analyst living in Mauritius, for in-depth research on the domestic policy impact of Africans educated in China and for general career development.
I thank Rasheed Griffith for leading the selection process behind our new branch of Emergent Ventures Africa and African diaspora.
Emergent Ventures, 22nd cohort
Emily Karlzen, Arizona, Founder and CEO of Arch Rift, to develop an astronaut helmet for commercial space flight.
Mehran Jalali, for building energy storage systems, NYC, grew up in Iran.
Kyle Redlinghuys, a further award, recently launched an API to make the data from the James Webb Space Telescope available.
Pranav Myana, 18, University of Texas, Austin, working on incorporating renewable power into the grid.
Brian Chau, Waterloo (Canada), general career support for writing and podcasting. Here is his Substack.
Cathal J. Nolan, historian, Boston University, to write a book on the relationship between war and progress. Just learned he was born in Dublin.
Cynthia Haven, Stanford University, to write a book on John Milton and the 17th century. Twitter here.
Harsehaj Dhami, 17, lives in Ontario, to visit a Longevity conference in Copenhagen. LinkedIn here.
Jackson Oswalt, Knoxville, builds things, AR/XR stuff, for general career support. In the Guinness Book of World Records for achieving a nuclear fusion reaction at age 12.
Miguel Ignacio Solano and Maria Elena Solano, Bogota/Cambridge, MA, co-founders of VMind, an artificial intelligence project.
Brian Kelleher, 18, Dublin, to improve software for doctors.
Devon Zuegel, to develop a new village and community, Twitter here.
Rodolfo Herrera, Pensamiento Libre, market-oriented Facebook and YouTube videos for Mexico.
Alia Abbas, 19, Maryland, to study biochemistry and materials and for general career development.
There are two other projects not yet ready for public announcement.
Ukraine tranche: There is now a new Emergent Ventures Ukraine.
Julia Brodsky, Maryland, former instructor of astronauts. To support educational efforts to teach on-line STEM and other subjects to Ukrainian children in refugee camps.
Uliana Ronska, 17, Prague and Netherlands currently. She is doing research on problems of triangulating fast-moving stars. It was also under her leadership that her team won ExPhO, CETO, and 2 all-Ukrainian Motion physics olympiads. For general career development.
Demian Zhelyabovskyy, currently at Bromsgrove School in the UK, from Kyiv. Last year he won first place in the All-Ukrainian Physics Marathon; also he and his teammates won the Experimental Physics Olympiad (ExPhO) and Computer Experiment Team Olympiad (CETO). For general career support, and for the physics paper he is currently co-authoring.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, representing the Kyiv School of Economics, to nurture talent development for Ukraine. Tymofiy as an individual was also the very first Emergent Ventures winner.
Congratulations to all, I am honored to be working with you!
Emergent Ventures India, fourth cohort
Here is the latest EV India cohort, and I am delighted to see more applications from young women and teenagers. I note also that a lot of the applicants for EV India are increasingly from smaller towns, or were raised in small towns before moving to larger cities for their projects.
EV India now has 75 winners! And I met most of them in Udaipur this last weekend. Here is the list of new winners:
Siddharth Kanungo is a chemical engineer by training and founder of Primer, an interactive conversational learning platform. Primer is designed for self-learners to learn subjects like mathematics, physics, computer science, that are usually offered in a university-level setting.
Keertana Subramani is a 23-year-old educator and social entrepreneur who wants to provide high-quality, accessible learning experiences. She received her EV grant to build SUVY Classes, a platform that vets and trains tutors for quality, and offers engaging, live classes for any learning need, and at twenty cents a day.
Arun Iyyanarappan is a 28-year-old electrical and software engineer passionate about creating alternate systems for electric power consumption. He received his EV grant to build a cost-effective solar powered house to show proof of concept for electrifying homes in rural areas at low-cost.
Gowtham Tummeda is a 21-year-old student interested in biology and programming and views biology as a software problem. He received his EV grant to build an end-to-end AI platform for biological data analysis. His larger ambition is to use the platform to model, design and simulate changes to strands of DNA at protein level using Deep Mind’s Alpha Fold.
Tejas Sidnal is an architect and researcher from Mumbai. He is the founder of CarbonCraft, a design and material innovation startup converting carbon emissions into building materials by fusing material knowledge of clean technologies with traditional techniques. He received an EV grant to reduce the curing process for Carbon Tiles from 28 days to under four hours for tiles that store captured carbon.
Hiya Jain is an 18-year-old interested in using EdTech to make education equitable. She received her EV grant to travel to San Francisco and better understand the EdTech space. She is currently working on UnMold, a project connecting high-school students in developing countries to PhD students running high information, low pressure, cohort-based courses to inject inspiration into a system.
Shruti Karandikar is a 16-year-old high school student from Bangalore. She has started ‘Screens for the Unscreened’ to collect phones, tablets, and laptops and donate them to underprivileged students. This is being converted into a non-governmental organization called ‘Mobilize’.
Sainadh Chityala is a 22-year-old engineering student. He received the EV grant to develop software to power self-driving cars in unpredictable and chaotic driving environments in urban India.
Samarth Bansal is a 28-year-old independent journalist and programmer in India. His reporting has appeared in Indian and foreign press like the The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Mint, and HuffPost, etc. He writes The Interval, a fortnightly newsletter. He received his EV grant to merge his two interests – developing AI platforms for journalism and serve the news at higher speed and lower cost.
Apurwa Masook is a 23-year-old structural engineer who graduated and cofounded and spearheaded India’s first Indigenous Student Rocketry Mission. He is the founder of Space Fields, a team of hustlers, engineers and space aficionados working towards affordable access to space. He received his EV grant to support Space Fields’s efforts in developing a low-cost high-performance green compositepellant to power next generation of Launch Vehicles.
Snigdha Poonam is a 38-year-old journalist and author from Delhi. She has written about identity politics, income inequality, tech culture, and crime. Her first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World, won 2018’s Crossword Award for nonfiction. She received an EV grant to travel across India to for her investigative work on scams and fraud in the contemporary Indian political economy.
Aniruddha Kenge is a 20-year-old student of industrial design with an interest in carbon-based materials, especially graphene. He is working towards decarbonizing plastics and making their use, reuse, and production sustainable, swiftly. He received his EV grant to develop hemp fiber-based bio-composites in India that can replace multi-use plastics.
Keya Krishna is a 16-year-old high school student in Washington DC interested in the intersection of science, technology, and public policy. She received her EV grant to measure pollution exposures at a hyper-local level with a high level of spatial and temporal granularity, specifically focusing on the pollution exposure of school-going youth.
Abhilash Mishra is the Founder and Chief Science Officer of EquiTech Futures. He trained as a physicist and holds an M.Phys from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Astrophysics from Caltech. EquiTech Futures is a network of innovators from around the world using data science and AI to tackle societal challenges. Abhilash received his EV grant to develop and scale cohort-based courses, research residencies, and educational networking, through their programs EquiTech Scholars, EquiTech Residency, and EquiTech Institutes.
Reuben Abraham is the founding CEO of Artha Global, a new Mumbai and London based policy research and consulting organization that provides the scaffolding for efforts aimed at building state capacity. He was named ‘Think Tanker of the Year 2022’ by Prospect Magazine for putting together a large platform that enabled inter-disciplinary work to tackle the Covid-19 crisis in India.
Zi Cheng “Sam” Huang is a 26-year-old ethnographic researcher interested in elite spaces and cultural replication. Currently, they are assisting on a project about the beliefs of AI researchers. In their free time, they coach Peking University in competitive debating, effective altruism, and started a fellowship for talented young debaters to engage in effective altruism. With their EV grant, they seek to understand scaling education programs in India especially IITs.
Mohammad Ruhul Kader is an entrepreneur and writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He founded Future Startup, a digital publication covering the startup and technology scene in Dhaka with an ambition to transform Bangladesh through entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes about internet business, strategy, technology, and society. He is the author of Rethinking Failure: A short guide to living an entrepreneurial life. He received his EV grant to scale Future Startup into a leading destination to learn about entrepreneurship, tech, and business in Bangladesh.
Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy (21) and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky (22) are data scientists from Chennai and Davis with backgrounds in computational social science research and government. They founded Jhana, a Bangalore-based artificial intelligence lab, and are interested in simplifying and democratizing legal processes and information, and in building alignment and ethics tools for back-checking deployed AI systems. They are building a state-of-the-art, automatic legal search interface for lawyers and students.
Tushar Khandelwal (24), is a former investment banker turned social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Sigma91 – a career accelerator for ambitious teens, and has built a community of over 400 highly talented teenagers.
Akash Kulgod is a 22-year-old researcher, writer, and techno-optimist from Belagavi, with a degree in cognitive science from UC Berkeley. He is the founder of Dogluk — a startup-DAO aiming to augment the ability of dogs to detect disease by transforming their olfactory perceptual abilities into digital and multidimensional signatures. He is also a team member of the Rajalakshmi Children Foundation. You can follow his substack for his writing and podcasts about Dogluk, effective altruism, and the psychedelic revival.
Raghav Gupta is a 24-year-old industrial engineer and the founder of EquiDEI, a crypto-fintech startup. EquiDEI is a blockchain based protocol designed to monetize unbanked supply chain assets of small and medium sized enterprises in India, to provide low risk liquidity options. His ambition is to use his startup to generate wealth and liquidity and jobs for the SME ecosystem.
SealXX is a bioplastic solution to replace single-use plastics based on the concept of biomimicry, and it is founded and run by five teenagers across the world. At SealXX, they want to make the everyday products by mimicking protein-based natural processes by reducing the need for plastic reliance. Chandhana, Nithi, Roy, Nathan, and Elly, cofounders of SealXX were awarded an EV grant to develop and scale their biomimicry process.
- Chandhana Sathishkumar is a 17-year-old Neuroscience and BCI researcher, an author, TED-Ed Speaker, NFT artist, and Guinness world record holder. She has experience working alongside Walmart; with Brains@Play to develop Accessify (a brain-controlled browser extension); and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to research fetal brains.
- Nithi Byreddy is a 17-year-old innovator and author researching the applications of carbon capture in climate science. She has worked on creating a blockchain-based solution to reduce people’s carbon footprint and has worked with IKEA to create sustainable innovations to reduce their carbon emissions.
- Roy Kim is a 16-year-old innovator and environmentalist interested in mimicking the mechanisms and designs of nature to create sustainable environments, mainly cities. In addition to working alongside Walmart, he is currently developing a theoretical ecological urban utopia and further exploring the applications of biomimicry in our society.
- Nathan Park is a 17-year-old entrepreneur who is interested in economics and business management. He is currently doing research on the economics of the housing market, and running a student-led, scientific publication called MIND Magazines that seeks to make science universally accessible to everyone.
Nexteen is an innovation accelerator program for 13-19 years-old students with programs aimed at exposing students to exponential tech to work on global challenges. Here are some of their ambitious students:
- Vedanth Nath,16, is is a high schooler, football enthusiast, and the creative engine at Nexteen. Prior to Nexteen, ran Media House, and has worked in in the WASH Sector. He also leads Tech and Youth at LooCafe helping them become the largest Toilet-WASH Company in the country.
- Karthik Nagapuri, 22, is an innovator, Defi developer, and student getting his completing the last year of his undergraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. At Nexteen, he’s building the tech infrastructure that would be useful for innovators who are part of the program. He also worked on Safe Block, a crypto wallet nominee system. He is also the winner of a separate EV grant for building open API framework and tech for LooCafe.
- Ayush Srivastava,19, is a serial entrepreneur who likes to work on operations of new startups to help them grow. He has helped operationalize several startups before Nexteen.
- Anvitha Kollipara,16, is an entrepreneur. She works on scaling, bringing international accreditation, and acquiring partnerships with companies such as Adobe for the non-profits she founded. She was named one of the top three teen change-makers by Forbes for her work with CareGood Foundation.
- Harsh Vardhan Shukla,19, is a YouTuber turned entrepreneur, completing his undergraduate degree in business development while working on the side on nanotech projects. He works on content production (videos) and podcasts.
Emergent Ventures India is now large enough for top-up grants and repeat winners! Some familiar names below:
- Nilay Kulkarni, a 22-year-old software developer from Nashik, for his fintech start up.
- Swasthik Padma to scale his start-up TrashTrap to scale Plascrete – a high strength building material made by converting non-recyclable plastic waste – for commercial use.
- Chandra Bhan Prasad to continue his excellent scholarship on Dalit capitalism and Dalit dignity.
- Naman Pushp, co-founder of Airbound, for his early efforts to explore sustainable on-ground mobility.
- Onkar Singh to continue developing his open-source CubeSat.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort and third cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Emergent Ventures winners, 21st cohort
Uzay Girit, 17, part Turkish part American, starting at MIT, general career support.
Hamidah Oderinwale, 17, Ontario with Nigerian origins, to sponsor an EA visit to Nigeria and also for general career support.
Yelim Kim, Champaigne-Urbana, Illinois, 15 years old, for an algae/bio project and general career development.
An anonymous grant to central/eastern Europe.
Rhett Ellis, autistic entrepreneur in Brisbane, a deeptech replacement for the CV/Resume that measures the presence or absence of knowledge.
Oliver Kim, UC Berkeley economics graduate student, to research Chinese economic growth using light/satellite data for the period of critical reforms.
Luca Gattoni-Celli, founder YIMBYs of Northern Virginia. Here is his Twitter.
Jamie Brandon, Vancouver area independent researcher, working on making databases easier to use.
Kamil Galeev, for a new foreign policy consultancy, including with a study of Russia, the Russian region, and China.
Tom Bell, Chapman University, to produce a report In Search of the Best Policies for Translational Geroscience, with Kalon Boston.
The first and also twentieth Emergent Ventures cohort
I am pleased to be able to announce that the very first Emergent Ventures winner, several years ago, was Tymofiy Mylovanov, an Ukrainian economist affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh. Bloomberg covered Tymofiy’s all-important logistics activities in Ukraine here as explained by MR. And here is a good Pittnews profile.
Tymofiy has been so impactful he gets a cohort of his own, in addition to being the very first winner. The early EV grant to Tymofiy was to encourage him to write on the Ukraine economy, in Ukrainian, and this led in turn to his being appointed the Economy Minister in the Zelensky cabinet, which later morphed into his current set of responsibilities in Ukraine. (Not all EV grants are publicized up front, for a variety of reasons).
Very recently Emergent Ventures made a grant to the Kyiv School of Economics, led by Tymofiy, and if you wish you can support them here. We are delighted to be helping his efforts and to have him and the School as our twentieth cohort.
Emergent Ventures winners, 19th cohort
Avi Schiffman, Harvard University. a second award to Avi, for his Ukraine Take Shelter project.
Carol Vieria de Magelhaes, Brazil and Northwestern University, to support a visiting research internship at Harvard Medical School.
BioDojo House, “A 3 month long co-living community in the Boston/Cambridge area from June-Aug, hosting 6-10 next generation builders & young emerging scientists between 18-25 years old.”
Serene, a free speech project, to expand Tor/Snowflake for Russian and other access to the uncensored internet.
Hector Alberto Diaz Gomez, Peru, Amazonas, general career development and travel, and for research into multilingual search engines.
Louise Perry and Fiona Mackenzie, London area, The Other Half, “a feminist think tank with a post-liberal agenda.”
Bridget Pegg, St. Louis and Mizzou, for general career development, and intellectual and policy outreach for Missouri and the broader Midwest.
Marius Hobbhahn, Tübingen, AI safety and for writings on many other topics as well.
Zeel Patel, Harvard and Broad Institute of MIT, applying machine learning to health care through AI.
Dwarkesh Patel, Austin, podcasting and general career support.
Tim Farrelly, Dublin, working on AI and vision issues and for general career development and conference travel.
Yang Zheng, North Hollywood, a project to crowdsource AI problems.
Ben Smith, University of Oregon, from New Zealand. For his project on “multi-objective reinforcement learning with an exponential-log function.”
Paulina M Paiz, San Francisco/Toronto, travel grant to attend scientific conferences, and to continue with her work using DeepChem.
Congratulations!
Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort
Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.
Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.
Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers. Substack here.
Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!
Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.
Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.
Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore. Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.
Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.
Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.
Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.
James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.
Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.
Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.
Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.
Congratulations to you all! We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.
Emergent Ventures winners, seventeenth cohort
Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp, to found a think tank related to progress studies.
Joe Francis, a farmer in Wales, to write a book on the economic and historical import of slavery in the American republic.
Ananya Chadha, freshman at Stanford, general career development, her interests include neurology and electrical engineering.
Eric Xia, Brown University to develop word association software and for general career development. He is “making a metaphysical sport” and working on word.golf.
Isaak Freeman, from southeast Austria, in a gap year after high school, general career development.
Davis Kedrosky, undergraduate at UC Berkeley, for economic history and general career development. Home page here, Substack here.
Katherine Dee and Emmet Penney, for general career development including collaboration. Among other topics, Katherine has worked on reimagining tech and Emmett has worked on promoting nuclear fusion.
Grant Gordon, to remedy hunger and nutrition problems in East Africa and also more broadly.
Sofia Sigal-Passeck, Yale University, “Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Uniphage, a biotechnology start-up which aims to eradicate bacterial diseases using the combined power of bacteriophages and artificial intelligence.”
Brian Potter, to improve productivity in construction, through both writing and practice. Here is his Substack.
Daniel Liu, attending UCLA, to study computational biology and for general career development.
Molly Mielke, founder and CEO of Moth Minds, a new company to find talent and revolutionize philanthropy: “Moth Minds is building the foundation that enables anyone to start their own grants program based on finding work that gets them excited about the future.”
Here are previous Emergent Ventures winners.
Emergent Ventures India, new winners, third Indian cohort
Angad Daryani / Praan
Angad Daryani is 22-year-old social entrepreneur and inventor from Mumbai, and his goal is to find solutions for clean air at a low cost, accessible to all. He received his EV grant to build ultra-low cost, filter-less outdoor air purification systems for deployment in open areas through his startup Praan. Angad’s work was recently covered by the BBC here.
Swasthik Padma
Swasthik Padma is a 19-year-old inventor and researcher. He received his EV grant to develop PLASCRETE, a high-strength composite material made from non-recyclable plastic (post-consumer plastic waste which consists of Multilayer, Film Grade Plastics and Sand) in a device called PLASCREATOR, also developed by Swasthik. The final product serves as a stronger, cost-effective, non-corrosive, and sustainable alternative to concrete and wood as a building material. He is also working on agritech solutions, desalination devices, and low cost solutions to combat climate change.
Ajay Shah
Ajay Shah is an economist, the founder of the LEAP blog, and the coauthor (with Vijay Kelkar) of In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy, an excellent book, covered by Alex here. He received his EV grant for creating a community of scholars and policymakers to work on vaccine production, distribution, and pricing, and the role of the government and private sector given India’s state capacity.
Meghraj Suthar
Meghraj Suthar, is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and author from Jodhpur. He founded Localites, a global community (6,000 members from more than 130 countries) of travelers and those who like to show around their cities to travelers for free or on an hourly charge. He also writes inspirational fiction. He has published two books: The Dreamers and The Believers and is working on his next book. He received his EV grant to develop his new project Growcify– helping small & medium-sized businesses in smaller Indian cities to go online with their own end-to-end integrated e-commerce app at very affordable pricing.
Jamie Martin/ The Queen’s English
Jamie Martin and Sandeep Mallareddy founded The Queen’s English to develop a tool to help speak English. Indians who speak English earn 5x more than those who don’t. The Queen’s English provides 300 hours of totally scripted lesson plans on a simple Android app for high quality teaching by allowing anyone who can speak English to teach high quality spoken English lessons using just a mobile phone.
Rubén Poblete-Cazenave
Rubén Poblete-Cazenave is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His work has focused on studying topics on political economy, development economics and economics of crime, with a particular interest in India. Rubén received his EV grant to study the dynamic effects of lockdowns on criminal activity and police performance in Bihar, and on violence against women in India.
Chandra Bhan Prasad
Chandra Bhan Prasad is an Indian scholar, political commentator, and author of the Bhopal Document, Dalit Phobia: Why Do They Hate Us?, What is Ambedkarism?, Dalit Diary, 1999-2003: Reflections on Apartheid in India, and co-author author (with D Shyam Babu and Devesh Kapur) of Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs. He is also the founder of the ByDalits.com e-commerce platform and the editor of Dalit Enterprise magazine. He received his EV grant to pursue his research on Dalit capitalism as a movement for self-respect.
Praveen Tiwari
Praveen Tiwari is a rural education entrepreneur in India. At 17, he started Power of Youth to increase education and awareness among rural students in his district. To cope with the Covid lockdown he started the Study Garh with a YouTube channel to provide better quality educational content to rural students in their regional language (Hindi).
Preetham R and Vinayak Vineeth
Preetham R. and Vinayak Vineeth are 17-year-old high-schoolers from Bangalore. Preetham is interested in computing, futurism and space; and Vinayak is thinking about projects ranging from automation to web development. They received their EV grant for a semantic text analysis system based on graph similarity scores. The system (currently called the Knowledge Engine) will be used for perfectly private contextual advertising and will soon be expanded for other uses like better search engines, research tools and improved video streaming experiences. They hope to launch it commercially by the end of 2022.
Shriya Shankar:
Shriya Shankar is a 20-year-old social entrepreneur and computer science engineer from Bangalore and the founder of Project Sitara Foundation, which provides accessible STEM education to children from underserved communities. She received her EV grant to develop an accessible ed-tech series focused on contextualizing mathematics in Kannada to make learning more relatable and inclusive for children.
Baishali Bomjan and Bhuvana Anand
Baishali and Bhuvana are the co-founders of Trayas Foundation, an independent research and policy advisory organization that champions constitutional, social, and market liberalism in India through data-informed public discourse. Their particular focus is on dismantling regulatory bottlenecks to individual opportunity, dignity and freedom. The EV grant will support Trayas’s work for reforms in state labor regulations that ease doing business and further prosperity, and help end legal restrictions placed on women’s employment under India’s labor protection framework to engender economic agency for millions of Indians.
Akash Bhatia and Puru Botla / Infinite Analytics
Infinite Analytics received their first grant for developing the Sherlock platform to help Indian state governments with mobility analysis to combat Covid spread. Their second EV grant is to scale their platform and analyze patterns to understand the spread of the Delta variant in the 2021 Covid wave in India. They will analyze religious congregations, election rallies, crematoria footfalls and regular daily/weekly bazaars, and create capabilities to understand the spread of the virus in every city/town in India.
PS Vishnuprasad
Vishnuprasad is a 21-year-old BS-MS student at IISER Tirupati. He is interested in the intersection of political polarization and network science and focused on the emergence and spread of disinformation and fake news. He is working on the spread of disinformation and propaganda in spaces Indians use to access information on the internet. He received his EV grant to build a tool that tracks cross-platform spread of disinformation and propaganda on social media. He is also interested in the science of cooking and is a stand-up comedian and writer.
Prem Panicker:
Prem Panicker is a journalist, cricket writer, and founding editor of peepli.org, a site dedicated to multimedia long form journalism focused on the environment, man/animal conflict, and development. He received an EV grant to explore India’s 7,400 km coastline, with an emphasis on coastal erosion, environmental degradation, and the consequent loss of lives and livelihoods.
Vaidehi Tandel
Vaidehi Tandel is an urban economist and Lecturer at the Henley Business School in University of Reading. She is interested in understanding the challenges and potential of India’s urban transformation and her EV grant will support her ongoing research on the political economy of urbanization in India. She was part of the team led by Malani that won the EV Covid India prize.
Abhinav Singh
Abhinav recently completed his Masters in the Behavioral and Computational Economics program at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute. His goal is to make political economy ideas accessible to young Indians, and support those interested in advancing critical thinking over policy questions. He received his EV grant to start Polekon, a platform that will host educational content and organize seminars on key political economy issues and build a community of young thinkers interested in political economy in India.
Bevin A./Contact
CONTACT was founded by two engineers Ann Joys and Bevin A. as a low-cost, voluntary, contact tracing solution. They used RFID tags and readers for consenting individuals to log their locations at various points like shops, hotels, educational institutions, etc. These data are anonymized and analyzed to track mobility and develop better Covid policies, while maintaining user anonymity.
Onkar Singh Batra
Onkar Singh is a 16-year-old developer/researcher and high school student in Jammu. He received his first EV grant for his Covid Care Jammu project. His goal is to develop India’s First Open-Source Satellite, and he is founder of Paradox Sonic Space Research Agency, a non-profit aerospace research organization developing inexpensive and open-source technologies. Onkar received his second EV grant to develop a high efficiency, low cost, nano satellite. Along with EV his project is also supported by an Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) grant. Onkar has a working engineering model and is developing the final flight model for launch in 2022.
StorySurf
Storysurf, founded by Omkar Sane and Chirag Anand, is based on the idea that stories are the simplest form of wisdom and that developing an ocean of stories is the antidote to social media polarization. They are developing both a network of writers, and a range of stories between 6-300 words in a user-friendly app to encourage people to read narratives. Through their stories, they hope to help more readers consume information and ideas through stories.
Naman Pushp/ Airbound
Airbound is cofounded by its CEO Naman Pushp, a 16 year old high-schooler from Mumbai passionate about engineering and robotics, and COO Faraaz Baig, a 20 year old self-taught programmer and robotics engineers from Bangalore. Airbound aims to make delivery accessible by developing a VTOL drone design that can use small businesses as takeoff/landing locations. They have also created the first blended wing body tail sitter (along with a whole host of other optimizations) to make this kind of drone delivery possible, safe and accessible.
Anup Malani / CMIE / Prabhat Jha
An joint grant to (1) Anup Malani, Professor at the University of Chicago, (2) The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), and (3) Prabhat Jha, Professor at University of Toronto and the Centre for Global Health Research, to determine the extent to which reported excess deaths in India are due to Covid. Recent studies show that that the pandemic in India may be associated with between 3 million to 4.9 million excess deaths, roughly 8-12 times officially reported number of COVID deaths. To determine how many of these deaths are statistically attributable to Covid, they will conduct verbal autopsies on roughly 20,000 deaths, with the results to be made publicly available.
And finally:
Aditya Dar/The Violence Archive
A joint grant to Aaditya Dar, an economist at Indian School of Business, Kiran Garimella, a computer scientist at Rutgers University and Vasundhara Sirnate, a political scientist and journalist for creating the India Violence Archive. They will use machine learning and natural language processing to develop an open-source historical record of collective public violence in India over 100 years. The goal is to create accessible and high-quality public data so civil society can pursue justice and governments can make better policy.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. EV India announcement here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort here. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
Note that EV India is led and run by Shruti Rajagopalan, I thank her for all of her excellent work on this!
Here is Shruti on Twitter, and here is her excellent Ideas of India podcast. Shruti is herself an earlier Emergent Ventures winner, and while she is very highly rated remains grossly underrated.
Emergent Ventures winners, sixteenth cohort
Phoebe Yao, founder and CEO of Pareto, “a human API delivering the business functions startups desperately need.” Here is the Pareto website. She was born in China, formerly of Stanford, and a former classical violist. (By my mistake I left her off of a previous cohort list, apologies!)
BeyondAging, a new group to support longevity research.
Sam Enright, for writing, blogging, and general career development, resume here. From Ireland, currently studying in Scotland.
Zena Hitz, St. John’s College, to build The Catherine Project, to revitalize the study of the classics.
Gavin Leech, lives in Bristol, he is from Scotland, getting a Ph.D in AI. General career support, he is interested in: “Personal experimentation to ameliorate any chronic illness; reinforcement learning as microscope on Goodhart’s law; weaponised philosophy for donors; noncollege routes to impact.”
Valmik Rao, 17 years old, Ontario, he is building a program to better manage defecation in Nigeria.
Rabbi Zohar Atkins, New York City, to pursue a career as a public intellectual. Here is one substack, here is another.
Basil Halperin, graduate student in economics at MIT, for his writing and for general career development.
Gytis Daujotas, lives in Dublin, studying computer science at DCU, for a project to make the Great Books on the web easy to read, and for general career development. Here is his web site.
Geoff Anders, Leverage Research, to support his work to find relevant bottlenecks in science and help overcome them. A Progress Studies fellow.
Samantha Jordan, NYU Stern School of Business, with Nathaniel Bechhofer, for a new company, “Our platform will accelerate the speed and quality of science by enabling scientists to easily manage their data and research pipelines, using best practices from software engineering.” Also a Progress Studies grant.
Nina Khera, “I’m a teenage human longevity researcher who’s interested in preventing aging-related diseases, especially those related to brain aging. In the past, I’ve worked with companies like Alio on computation and web-dev-based projects. I’ve also worked with labs like the Gladyshev lab and the Adams lab on data analysis and machine learning-based projects.” Her current project is Biotein, about developing markers for aging, based in Ontario.
Lipton Matthews, from Jamaica, here is his YouTube channel, for general career development.
Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients
Long-term complications after coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are common in hospitalized patients, but the spectrum of symptoms in milder cases needs further investigation. We conducted a long-term follow-up in a prospective cohort study of 312 patients—247 home-isolated and 65 hospitalized—comprising 82% of total cases in Bergen during the first pandemic wave in Norway. At 6 months, 61% (189/312) of all patients had persistent symptoms, which were independently associated with severity of initial illness, increased convalescent antibody titers and pre-existing chronic lung disease. We found that 52% (32/61) of home-isolated young adults, aged 16–30 years, had symptoms at 6 months, including loss of taste and/or smell (28%, 17/61), fatigue (21%, 13/61), dyspnea (13%, 8/61), impaired concentration (13%, 8/61) and memory problems (11%, 7/61). Our findings that young, home-isolated adults with mild COVID-19 are at risk of long-lasting dyspnea and cognitive symptoms highlight the importance of infection control measures, such as vaccination.
That is from a new Nature paper by Bjørn Blomberg, et.al. Via SK. On vaccinating the young, here are further relevant observations from Francois Balloux.
Emergent Ventures winners, 15th cohort
Emily Oster, Brown University, in support of her COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and the related “Data Hub” proposal, to ease and improve school reopenings, project here.
Kathleen Harward, to write and market a series of children’s books based on classical liberal values.
William Zhang, a high school junior on Long Island, NY, for general career development and to popularize machine learning and computation.
Kyle Schiller, to study possibilities for nuclear fusion.
Aaryan Harshith, 15 year old in Ontario, for general career development and “LightIR is the world’s first device that can instantly detect cancer cells during cancer surgery, preventing the disease from coming back and keeping patients healthier for longer.”
Anna Harvey, New York University and Social Science Research Council, to bring evidence-based law and economics research to practitioners in police departments and legal systems.
EconomistsWritingEveryDay blog, here is one recent good Michael Makowsky post.
Richard Hanania, Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, to pursue their new mission.
Jeremy Horpedahl, for his work on social media to combat misinformation, including (but not only) Covid misinformation.
Congratulations! Here are previous Emergent Ventures winners.
Emergent Ventures winners, 14th cohort
Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, to hire a new director.
Zach Mazlish, recent Brown graduate in philosophy, for travel and career development.
Upsolve.org, headed by Rohan Pavuluri, to support their work on legal reform and deregulation of legal services for the poor.
Madison Breshears, GMU law student, to study the proper regulation of cryptocurrencies.
Quest for Justice, to help Californians better navigate small claims court without a lawyer.
Cameron Wiese, Progress Studies fellow, to create a new World’s Fair.
Jimmy Alfonso Licon, philosopher, visiting position at George Mason University, general career development.
Tony Morley, Progress Studies fellow, from Ngunnawal, Australia, to write the first optimistic children’s book on progress.
Michelle Wang, Sophomore at the University of Toronto, Canada, to study the causes and cures of depression, and general career development, and to help her intern at MIT.
Here are previous cohorts of winners.
Emergent Ventures winners, 13th cohort
Kenny Workman, building tools for computational biology.
Brianna GoPaul, “17 y/o learning fusion energy.”
Justin Glibert, from Belgium near Liege, nanotechnology and cryptography and space manufacturing.
Andrew Tate Young, custom audio from blogs, and to create audiobooks from science information in the public domain.
Rasheed Griffith, Barbados, podcast on China in the Caribbean, and Substack on the same.
Michael Trinh of Toronto, synthetic biology and immunology, general career development.
Austin Diamond, general career development.
Trevor Chow, from Hong Kong now at Cambridge studying economics and monetary policy, here is his blog.
Lea Degen, from southern Germany now in San Francisco, podcasting and general career support, more here.
A splendid cohort, we are honored to have you as winners, and here are previous Emergent Ventures cohorts.
Emergent Ventures winners, 12th cohort
Markus Strasser, from Linz and now London, to work on natural language processing for scientific outputs.
Andres Leon, a 17-year-old from Mexico City who is building a mobile payments company with his brother.
Ifat Lerner, Lerner Labs, a new venture customizing education for K-12 students.
Brianna Wolfson, for a start-up focused on teaching corporate culture.
Mukundh Murthy, 17-year-old from Massachusetts, studies biology, computational biology, and antibiotic resistance; the award is for general career development.
Youyang Gu, here are his Covid-19 projections using machine learning. Here is his recent blog post.
Matt Faherty, to study and write about the NIH.