Today NSF Director Subra Suresh announced Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW), a new and coordinated effort that will expand and enhance international collaborative research opportunities for NSF Graduate Research Fellows, with initial agreements with science agencies in eight countries.
On October 9, a Taliban-affiliated terrorist boarded a school bus in rural Pakistan and gunned down three schoolgirls, including 15 year-old women’s activist Malala Yousufzai. Miraculously, all three girls survived, but Malala sustained grave injuries and remains in critical condition.
As we continue to try and pick ourselves up from this staggering economy, nothing sounds better than the promise of 600 new jobs—made possible due to a partnership between Boston-based consulting firm Find Boomer and crowdfunding platformLauncht. Together, they have developed VoltCrowd, a crowdfunding challenge turned startup accelerator.
Choosing the right crowdfunding platform for your business or project can be an overwhelming process. At face value, many of the popular sites can look identical, and the numerous factors involved can turn this into a complicated decision. The first step in choosing a crowdfunding platform is to ensure that you have a solid idea that will appeal to the crowdfunding model.
The HERRI hand rehabilitation system, developed at the Biomedical Mechatronics lab at Northeastern University, is composed of a 2-DoF robotic interface, virtual environment, practitioner’s graphical user interface (GUI), and the auxiliary control hardware/software. The patient manipulates the robotic hand interface just like a joystick to navigate in a virtual environment (i.e. maze game) while the robot applies force fields to the patient’s hand. The device is intended to aid motor recovery in post-stroke patients through repetitive and coordinated motions for task specific exercises.
Ask any scientist in the university system what they spend most of their time doing, and the answer may surprise and disappoint you. Generally speaking, it’s not science. It’s not even grading papers or overseeing students to nurture a new generation of researchers and innovators. Filling out grant paperwork is the single activity that dominates the days of all too many researchers and academics.
Thanks to popular sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, crowdfunding is now commonplace. They’re the platforms musicians turn to, to release their first CD, or where local alumni pray to break their initial $18,000 fundraising goal in just 25 hours. Although started for today’s creatives, however, crowdfunding’s begun to to take a turn for the educational. Because if you can crowdfund art, why not crowdfund academic research?
Boston-based startup IAMScientist hopes to apply the crowd-funding approach pioneered by Kickstarter to research funding.
The company has already enjoyed modest success as a matchmaking service for companies and scientists. For a fee, it will tap its network of researchers—mainly in medicine and the life sciences—to find an available expert in a specific research area. But IAMScientist recently started allowing users to advertise projects for others to fund as well.
It has an intuitive user interface which provides flexibility to serve patients in any care setting across a wide range of applications, including cardiology, abdominal, obstetrics, fertility, vascular, breast and musculoskeletal imaging.
