National Science Foundation

But it was the perfect thing for me to be able to just learn talk to people.

I took advantage of a lot of programs at Carnegie Mellon, the National Science Foundation, Pittsburgh.

The city of Pittsburgh has a lot of amazing entrepreneurship programs, and they really helped develop the kind of business mentality, which is very different from the PhD engineering mentality, to be able to understand how to transform technology into a product.

You know, I Shortly after I finished my PhD, when Pele and I first applied to Y Combinator, I got engaged and it was very exciting.

It felt very, I guess, a little far-fetched, I can see, if they were not familiar with machine learning and AI.

So that's how, on the research front, I had already done work like that at Stanford, applying messy models to this kind of data, and it felt completely, and that's how we got started, and we started showing all these fascinating results of how these models could be used for early detection, not just for sepsis, but in a whole host of conditions, And at Hopkins, we were having a lot of fun, like through very large initiatives and grants funded by NIH, NSF, DARPA, CDC, FDA, you know, it was, there were all these beautiful results we were showing, which was for me, like intellectually, just fascinating.

And then I unfortunately lost my nephew to sepsis.

And that was, you know, hard because I felt like on the one hand, my work was getting a lot of attention and people very excited by it.

This is the Discovery Files podcast from the US National Science Foundation.

To keep the United States at the leading edge of discovery, NSF funds basic and solutions-oriented research that generates new knowledge to fuel industries of the future, create world-leading technologies, and improve the lives of the American people.

We're joined today by Jeremy Brown, an NSF-supported researcher whose haptics and medical robots lab studies the human perception of touch, especially as it relates to applications of human-robot interaction and collaboration.

particularly in medical applications, such as minimally invasive surgical robots, rehabilitation robots, and upper limb prosthetic devices.

Professor Brown, thank you so much for joining me today.

Moreover, there are at least annual checks due.

from the agencies, the NIH, the National Science Foundation, the, for example, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is where I've been funded from.

And so you owe the program manager this report once a year.

And in some agencies, it's quarterly and they can cut your funding at any time if you're not cutting the mustard.

Since news of the gift surfaced, Donald Trump Jr. has reportedly paid back the oligarch.

A National Science Foundation memo announced an overhaul of how the organization will award research grants, which will favor the Trump administration's research priorities over scientists, as part of the administration's broad overhaul of the federal government's scientific research funding processes.

Department of Homeland Security predictive intelligence targeting teams are reportedly analyzing Americans' financial data to provide intelligence for local police to conduct traffic stops.

A Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson said that a PIT, which is run by Border Patrol, monitors indicators of potential smuggling and other criminal activity.

It's an important arrow, but you certainly can't see it as the be all and end all for solving innovation funding.

So those who would, for example, recommend that much more of our basic science get funded by private capital might be missing the long-term kinds of investments that the government has made, whether through DARPA or NIH and NSF or other kinds of programs, national laboratories and the like.

that fund things that don't necessarily have immediate returns, but that may then produce the kinds of ideas and the kinds of ultimate products and processes that could then take off and probably would take off best with private capital support.

Absolutely.

What do you think about the future viability of my business? If the United States government was doing that to me, and they handed me those papers, and I looked at the debt we're in, and then I looked at the fraud, waste, and abuse, I would say, you not only need to be shut down, you need to be arrested because you are so incompetent that you should be jailed for it.

But look at some of the positive examples, right? What about the fact that it was our government that invented the internet with DARPA, with Winsurf there who figured out how actually the internet should work and NSF.

What about the fact that they invented GPS? What about what I mentioned? They got someone to the moon and NASA.

A lot of the drugs come out of the NIH.

Let's see if we can get a fellowship and go to Europe.

So I'd applied to NIH and NSF, and it turns out I received a letter from NSF.

I'm sort of making up the date here, but let's say it's March 15th.

for a fellowship to go to Italy to work with a person who I had met who had visited Gottlieb's lab one of the years I was there.