In 2019, MIT Ph.D. students Daniel Goodwin and Paul Reginato began working on a way to build community, resources, funding, and education in the field of climate biotechnology.
The pair says they are focusing on the relatively new field of climate biotechnology because of biology’s potential to create a healthy climate. Examples of this include using enzymes that convert raw CO2 into commodities to microbes that extract metals for the energy transition.
This month the co-founders launched Homeworld Collective, a Boston-based nonprofit that will provide community, guidance and funding for climate biotechnologists focused on planetary health.
Homeworld Collective is backed by $3.5 million from science philanthropies including Schmidt Futures and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Some of the funding is earmarked for funding novel climate biotech research.
Alongside its launch, the nonprofit announced $1 million would be deployed in the first cycle of its grantmaking system, called Homeworld Garden Grants. This first round of funding will focus on climate solutions that utilize protein engineering. Homeworld will also provide a cohort and mentorship program for the applicants it funds.
"There are countless biotechnologists worldwide looking to apply their talents to building a sustainable way of life and protecting our planet. However, many of these brilliant and driven individuals struggle with a lack of clear pathways to impact and people to work with,” Reginato, founding co-director of Homeworld Collective, said in a statement.
Reginato said much of the advances in biotechnology over the past few decades was driven by medicine. This has created a community around medical biotech to support innovations in this area.
“In contrast, climate biotechnology currently lacks the social infrastructure and problem maps that can enable people to connect to impactful work. We're eager to extend our support to this motivated community and continue building pathways to meaningful and impactful work in climate biotechnology,” Reginato said.
A spokesperson for the nonprofit said Goodwin is based in Boston and Reginato now resides in Berkeley. The pair met while completing their Ph.D.’s at MIT.
“At this point, we've met with over 500 practitioners across the climate biotech ecosystem,” Goodwin said in a statement. “Creating funding resources — like our Garden Grants program — is critical, but not sufficient to support a thriving community in climate biotech. We need to go beyond financial resources and think about what makes a community productive, and make tools that improve the productivity of an entire field by supporting the needs of practitioners as fully as possible.”
Beyond funding, Homeworld Collective plans to focus on what it calls “technology roadmap development,” or identifying potential research pathways in emerging areas of climate biotech. The nonprofit will then connect biotechnologists with engineers who, together, have the expertise to address these research questions.
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