Powering wearable devices for long-term disease management and designing “artificial leaves” that can turn carbon dioxide into sustainable fuels are just two innovative ideas boosted by our early-stage funding.
The Schmidt Science Fellows Catalyst Grant scheme is designed to ensure that our Fellows’ ambitious, interdisciplinary collaborations have the opportunity to flourish.
The Grants provide early-stage seed funding for emerging ideas that may find it hard to attract investment from other sources at this stage of development.
The support also fosters collaboration and connection across our Senior Fellow community.
Six projects have been supported in the 2025 funding round, with the potential to transform sustainability, healthcare, and drug discovery.
Schmidt Science Fellows Director of Fellowship Affairs and Lifelong Community Arielle Baker said: “Collaboration and community are at the heart of our Fellowship and our interdisciplinary ethos.
“Collaboration and community are at the heart of our Fellowship and our interdisciplinary ethos.”
“This approach naturally sparks innovative conversations and ambitious, boundary-crossing ideas.
“The purpose of the Catalyst Grants is to ensure that ambition is captured and innovative ideas are given the opportunity to develop”.
Upon completing their Fellowship Research Placement and our Science Leadership Program, our Fellows transition into our Senior Fellows community.
As Senior Fellows, they have access to programming, mentorship, and support, including the Catalyst Grant scheme.
The funding is designed to support collaborations emerging from Research Placements or Fellowship discussions and helps build a strong cross-cohort community.
To date, the scheme has supported 36 Senior Fellows and 21 collaborations.
Outputs from Catalysts Grants have included novel ideas that have underpinned major research projects and start-ups.
Dr. Baker added: “This small-scale funding has the power to reach beyond the initial project.
“It fosters lasting collaborations and the exploration of new research directions, each with the potential to generate further innovative concepts and proposals”.
Supported this year, Fellows Susmita Sarkar and Sandya Subramanian will collaborate to develop a long-lasting, lightweight, and flexible battery that would enable multi-sensor wearable home monitoring for patients with chronic illnesses.
One of the significant technical barriers to providing this continuous data collection and personalized care is the limited battery size and capacity.
The pair, who are in different cohorts, met at the 2024 Interdisciplinary Science Summit in Toronto.
The project, at the intersection of neurotechnology, wearable engineering, medicine, and materials chemistry, is a result of those conversations.
Dr. Sarkar, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, said: “A strength of the Fellowship is it creates a community of interdisciplinary researchers with diverse expertise and perspectives, in our case, technology development and clinical validation.
“Our idea was sparked via conversations we had at the 2024 Interdisciplinary Science Summit, and the Catalyst Grant is providing us with the essential support needed for our collaboration to develop and grow.”
“Our idea was sparked via conversations we had at the 2024 Interdisciplinary Science Summit, and the Catalyst Grant is providing us with the essential support needed for our collaboration to develop and grow.”
The 2025 awardees also include Fellows Harsha Gurnani and Juncal Arbelaiz, who have been given further Catalyst funding to extend a project initially supported in 2024.
The collaboration seeks to develop algorithms for optimizing the closed-loop control of neural activity, an approach with the potential to advance clinical neurotechnology for conditions such as paralysis and epilepsy.
The Catalyst Grant scheme is now in its fourth year.
In 2023, Fellows Fred Richards and Sasha Montelli received Catalyst Grant funding to investigate qualifying the impact of mantle heat on future Antarctic ice sheet stability.
Dr. Richards said the work had played an important role in developing a successful 1.5M euro European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant bid earlier this year.
He said: “The Catalyst work helped to underline the importance of having good estimates of heat flow from Earth’s deep interior into the base of polar ice sheets for accurately predicting their future behaviour and their associated sea-level contributions.
“The early findings from the Catalyst Grant were the inspiration for me putting improved heat flow estimates as a core objective of my ERC work”.
2025 Schmidt Science Fellows Catalyst Grants
Closing the loop in neuroscience: control of neural systems
- Juncal Arbelaiz (2022), Princeton University
- Harsha Gurnani (2022), New York University
Building upon their 2024 Catalyst Grant, Juncal Arbelaiz and Harsha Gurnani are developing algorithms for optimizing closed-loop neurostimulation design using a combination of system theory tools and data-driven machine-learning methods.
Designing inputs for complex dynamical systems has long been central to control theory, and scalable optimization is a core strength of modern machine learning.
The project aims to apply these advances to neuroscience, an approach that has the potential to accelerate neurotechnology for conditions such as paralysis, epilepsy, and depression.
Discovering and testing dual-functional materials for photothermal-driven carbon dioxide capture and in-situ conversion into sustainable fuels
- Samuel Greene (2022 Schmidt Science Fellow), University of Texas, Austin
- Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao (2022), Imperial College London
The collaboration will unite atomic-scale computer simulations and advanced laboratory experiments with a vision of discovering novel materials that act like artificial leaves, using the full solar spectrum for simultaneous capture and in-situ conversion of harmful carbon dioxide into clean, sustainable fuels.
The project could provide proof of concept for a more efficient paradigm: Integrated Carbon Capture and Utilization (ICCU), and dramatically lower the energy penalty and cost of sequential carbon capture and utilization processes.
Mechanistically informed reaction embeddings for biocatalysis
- Ariane Mora (2023), Aithyra – Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence, Austria
- Sahil Loomba (2023), Imperial College London
Enzymes are nature’s catalysts and the ability to find and engineer new enzymes is central to sustainable chemistry, drug discovery, and synthetic biology. Assigning function to an uncharacterized enzyme is a critical first step to expanding the natural catalyst toolkit.
Ariane Mora and Sahil Loomba aim to develop a new way to model an enzyme’s chemical reaction, advancing our ability to predict enzyme function and design new scaffolds.
This project sits at the intersection of biochemistry, bioengineering, machine learning, and causal inference.
Predicting intracellular condensate formation from protein sequences
- Kalli Kappel (2020), UCLA
- Trevor Grand Pre (2021), Washington University in St Louis
Biomolecular condensates are dynamic, membrane-less compartments that play key roles in genome regulation and RNA metabolism.
This project will combine large-scale experiments and physics-informed models to predict the assembly of protein sequences that intrinsically encode their propensity to form condensates.
This ability to predict condensate formation directly from protein sequences would transform our ability to interpret cellular effects of genetic variation, uncover mechanisms of disease, and design synthetic proteins with programmable functions.
Electrochemical recycling of bacterial siderophores for efficient mineral dissolution
- Neil Dalvie (2023), Harvard Medical School
- Solomon Oyakhire (2023), Georgia Institute of Technology
The collaboration will investigate if siderophores – organic molecules naturally made by bacteria to scavenge iron from the environment – could sustainably replace the harsh acids used in mining.
Extraction of metals is a global industry with a huge carbon footprint. Metals are typically extracted from mineral ores in hot, acidic conditions, which are energy-intensive and produce environmentally harmful waste streams.
By combining biogeochemistry with electrochemical engineering, this project could pave the way for a new approach to sustainable mineral extraction.
Next-generation battery design for at-home wearable monitoring of chronic disease
- Susmita Sarkar (2023), North Carolina State University
- Sandya Subramanian (2022), UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco
Susmita Sarkar and Sandya Subramanian aim to develop a durable, flexible battery to enable long-term clinical-grade wearable monitoring at home for patients with chronic illnesses.
Six out of ten Americans will develop a chronic disease in their lifetime, such as heart disease or diabetes. These diseases are often multifactorial, based on individual physiology and lifestyle. However, they are currently managed via short in-clinic appointments.
The ability to continuously monitor data at home would open the door to personalized medicine, but one of the biggest technical barriers to multi-day, multi-sensor continuous data collection using wearable sensors is battery capacity.
Photography: Claudine Gossett
