Evaluator · round one
Executive Director of the Good Science Project; formerly VP of Research at Arnold Ventures.
$1.73M of Stuart's recommendations funded
$1.53M granted through Stuart's order
I spent over 9 years as Vice President of Research at Arnold Ventures, a multi-billion philanthropy focused on evidence-based policy. I led a $60m grantmaking initiative on improving research and evidence, and wrote my experiences here: goodscience.substack.com/p/metascience-since-2012-a-personal
I left Arnold in 2021 and, at the suggestion of Patrick Collison, wrote up some ideas on what I would do with my own science policy effort. As a result, I launched the Good Science Project in early 2022 with the support of Collison and later many others including Schmidt Futures, Craig Falls and Adam Winkel of Jane Street, Alex Gerko, ACX Grants, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and more.
We focus on metascience,, i.e., the conditions for improving scientific progress via funding, policy, incentives, organizations and institutions, etc. We regularly interact with Congress and the White House, as well as the top leaders at NIH and NSF, and we have arguably the most widely-read and influential newsletter specifically dedicated to metascience.
I have consulted for the Sloan Foundation and Open Philanthropy (at the time), and have served as a peer reviewer for NSF, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the UK's Metascience Unit.
I tried to strike a balance between looking for high expected value in underfunded places and looking for high-risk bets on people or organizations that are not yet fully legible. From my own track record in philanthropy, some of the highest-impact grants that I ever made were NOT grants that had a fully legible and high expected value at the outset. Instead, the highest impact often came from giving a somewhat speculative grant to someone just because their idea (or their persona) set off my "spidey sense" (so to speak).
