Silver Beach

An effort to bring a completely new talent pool into research.

The Silver Beach Institute is a new research organization working to 100x the number of top-tier scientists in the world.

In 2020 and 2021, we ran small, intensive, web-based research courses during which 18-20 students with diverse backgrounds and varying levels of experience were immersed in a particular topic, engaging with both seminal and cutting-edge research work in order to start substantive projects of their own. These courses lasted between 5 and 16 weeks, and were built around semi-structured discussions led by an academic researcher doing important work in their field.

We are now working on Silver Beach Researcher Seed, a lightweight mechanism for funding new researchers with no previous published work, in particular those who are not part of a traditional graduate program in their field. We think there are many extraordinarily talented researchers capable of doing foundational work who are not able to get on the train to academia as it departs the station, whether for reasons of resources or geography or even merely the knowledge that such a path exists. We intend to give 100x more people a shot at doing novel research, and in doing so identify, train, and fund 100x more productive researchers from within their number. If, as many have speculated, scientific progress is slowing significantly, we need to do this to continue to move boldly into a better future as we have done over the past few centuries.

You can read more about us in the Let them do research manifesto.