Research Associate - Rodent Surgery & Behavior

Seattle-based Mafix has raised $5.4 million in pre-seed funding led by Azolla Ventures, with participation from Counteract VC, Astera Institute, Plug and Play Ventures, Impact Science Ventures, and a Dutch family office. The industrial technology startup produces carbon-negative silicon fertilizers from silicate rocks. Mafix's proprietary technology, developed at Stanford University, converts inert silicate rock into minerals that weather in a single growing season. The fertilizer restores soil health, boosts crop yields, and removes CO₂ from the atmosphere as stable bicarbonate. The company will use the funding to commercially demonstrate production of 1,000 tonnes of fertilizer. Mafix partners with cement producers to utilise spare kiln capacity, eliminating the need for new facilities whilst reducing costs and supply chain complexities. The startup was founded by Jade Marcus and Dr Matthew Kanan, a Stanford chemistry professor.

Astera partnering with the National Science Foundation to support Open Science. Steven Moss Science Policy Lead Jul 22 2026 Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a partnership with the Astera Institute related to the first round of investment in building a national network of automated laboratory infrastructure, known as the Programmable Cloud Laboratories (PCL) Test Bed Initiative. The NSF will spend $380 million spread across 20 awardees to advance AI and automated instrumentation for scientific experimentation and data collection. The Astera Institute will contribute up to $20 million in matched investment and provide additional support and expertise to awardees to advance their open science practices to make their science more rapidly available, machine-readable, and reproducible. This is the first time Astera is directly partnering with the federal government on a scientific program, but this partnership is not something Astera fell into by accident. Astera is continually looking for ways to promote and empower its approach to experimenting with how science is conducted and funded, including needed changes to scientific publishing that better and more quickly capture the full range of scientific outputs. Improvements on this front are not only enabled by AI but will also help fundamentally advance AI-enabled scientific discovery. Astera's own Open Science Policy espouses the need to get scientific information out quickly using publishing platforms and practices that focus on scientific utility rather than legacy journal systems that are optimized for and constrained by human limitations. To this end, Astera has built an ecosystem of investments and opportunities around open science, including: * The Stacks, an open-access publishing platform Astera is building with the end-goal of experimenting with different ways of making it easier for scientists to generate, structure, and share reproducible data that are geared toward reuse * Funded Programs such as the diffUSE Project, the Deliverome Project, and OpenADMET, which are all working to collect and openly publish AI-ready scientific information * The Hidden Science Competition, a recently announced competition to encourage graduate students to publish useful research beyond the constraints of traditional peer-reviewed scientific journals Astera view its collaboration with the NSF as an important step in adding to the ecosystem of open and rapidly available scientific information that will help to propel innovation forward. Astera is excited about this program and mode of partnership because PCLs create an opportunity to advance a more data-centric model of open science. Rather than treating data as a secondary output released only after an embargo and narrative-centric publication, the PCL Test Bed Program can support workflows in which well-structured, reusable data and metadata are shared rapidly and treated as valuable scientific outputs in their own right. The instrumentation associated with the PCL Test Bed Program emphasizes automated experimentation in controlled environments, enabling researchers to design and test new tools for standardized data-generation processes and capture of high-quality metadata throughout each experimental workflow. This inherently makes experiments more reproducible and data more AI-ready. These capabilities can uniquely enable rapid deposition into repositories and allow researchers and AI agents to more reliably discover, interpret, and reuse scientific outputs at scale while also supporting alternative publishing workflows organized around utility, reuse, and continuous deposition rather than a single final publication event. Through this public-private collaboration, NSF, Astera, and the PCL Test Bed awardees can combine federal leadership, private support, and scientific expertise to make research outputs across fields more AI-ready, interoperable, and reusable - accelerating discovery, increasing the value of publicly funded research, and helping scientific advances translate more rapidly into societal benefit. Steven Moss Science Policy Lead

Identifying systemic bottlenecks to science. Seemay Chou Mar 11 2026 Today, alongside the launch of Radial, Astera is opening an essay competition that I've been ruminating on for some time. Namely, inviting active scientists from any sector to share concrete research challenges that can inform its future work at Astera. Astera is interested in your hypotheses about what broad structural or systemic issues contribute to the bottlenecks you experience in your own science. It's important to me that Astera hear more from active scientists on the ground. Many of its scientific systems and institutions are no longer fit for purpose. How Astera fund work, share results, build teams, and connect science to other disciplines or sectors has long been in need of experimentation. This is no longer a controversial statement. Astera is living through a historical inflection point that demands change. One force is technological, happening at unprecedented scale and speed. AI is making it harder to ignore systemic and infrastructural gaps, while also changing what solutions are possible. This is an incredible forcing function Astera should leverage to update its scientific practices. At the same time, it's become harder to talk constructively about change in light of political differences and more recent budgetary contractions. But it's more important than ever to openly debate long-term reform now. And many disagreements are unlikely to be resolved through debate in the absence of real life testing. Astera is looking to you, scientists. The field of metascience, i.e. the science of science, is often driven today by non-scientists: policy experts, economists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, politicians. Their work can be very useful, but practicing scientists should be more deeply involved in shaping the systems they depend on. Scientists know first-hand what is broken. When scientists themselves have led metascience experiments, the outcomes have often been distinctive and more durable: new institutes structured around questions; focused research organizations built to unlock specific field-level bottlenecks; community infrastructure launched because there was simply no other way to make it happen; critical resources that can't wait for permission. Astera want to help get more scientists in the driver's seat of this conversation and source more hypotheses that can be tested for systemic improvements. Astera want all of it to happen in the open to stimulate more useful public debate about science. And Astera hope that will help the most compelling ideas get real world implementation through support from Astera or others. Examples of what Astera is looking for. Perhaps an easier way to explain what Astera is looking for is to highlight a few historical examples that Astera would have loved to fund early iteration for. Here are a few: * The Protein Data Bank A few crystallographers were frustrated that hard-won structural data was disappearing into individual labs with no way to share it. They bootstrapped a community archive in 1971 with just seven structures and no formal institutional mandate. Astera would have loved to award an essay describing this gap and fund the early bootstrapping required to prototype the foundational data infrastructure for structural biology and drug discovery worldwide. The scientist Paul Ginsparg noticed that his colleagues were emailing preprints to each other and built a centralized server in 1991 to do it better. Astera would have loved to award an essay describing this gap and fund the initial server required to test the utility of what became today's default open publishing infrastructure for physics, math, and computer science. It has since become a general model for the broader open-access movement. * Focused Research Organizations Two scientists, Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriques, were dead set on trying to generate more connectomics data as a critical public resource for the neuroscience community. This was a defined roadmap that required a start-up-like team, which lacked any dedicated funding mechanism. So they created one by inventing FROs, and it has become an enabling structure for many other projects with similar properties. Astera would have loved to fund early iterations of FRO projects (and Astera did through the first FRO: the longevity-focused Rejuvenome!). * Arcadia Science This one's an experiment I'm directly involved in that's still in a work-in-progress. Arcadia is a for-profit research company co-founded in 2020 by myself and another scientist, Prachee Avasthi. It was motivated by trying to reimagine how Astera could more effectively traverse a wider swath of biology for useful discovery than was possible in its academic labs. Astera asked how Astera could use data to develop organism-agnostic tools, compound broader lessons by sharing more of its work in real time, and open up new funding and sustainability strategies. It would be exciting to fund smaller scale pilots that could inform experiments that lead to new institutes, which can and should be less monolithic than what dominates today. I hope more scientists will join Astera in this dialogue, which is why I've asked that all submissions are public. I know it can sometimes be uncomfortable to put your neck out in this way, but positive change is more likely if Astera normalize open debate. Astera should approach all disagreements according to the scientific principles Astera were trained on. Data, not drama: let's do the experiment. Seemay Chou