By Zach Winn

Academic research groups and startups are essential drivers of scientific progress. But some projects, like the Hubble Space Telescope or the Human Genome Project, are too big for any one academic lab or loose consortium. They’re also not immediately profitable enough for industry to take on.

The original idea for focused research organizations came out of talks among researchers, most of whom were working to map the brain in MIT Professor Ed Boyden’s lab. After they began publishing their ideas, however, the researchers realized FROs could be a powerful tool to unlock scientific advances across many other applications.

“We were quite pleasantly surprised by the range of fields where we see FRO-shaped problems,” says Adam Marblestone, a former MIT research scientist who co-founded the nonprofit Convergent Research to help launch FROs in 2021. “Convergent has FRO proposals from climate, materials science, chemistry, biology — we even have launched a FRO on software for math. You wouldn’t expect math to be something with a large-scale technological research bottleneck, but it turns out even there, we found a software engineering bottleneck that needed to be solved.”

Marblestone helped formulate the idea for focused research organizations at MIT with a group including Andrew Payne SM ’17, PhD ’21 and Sam Rodriques PhD ’19, who were PhD students in Boyden’s lab at the time. Since then, the FRO concept has caught on. Convergent has helped attract philanthropic funding for FROs working to decode the immune system, identify the unintended targets of approved drugs, and understand the impacts of carbon dioxide removal in our oceans.