iAMscientist Launches to Provide a Crowdfunding Platform for Science, Technology, and Medicine

With a fast-growing database of more than 16 million scientists and researchers, iAMscientist seeks to establish a tight-knit community of funder-scientists

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--iAMscientist today officially announced the launch of its crowdfunding platform for the acceleration of scientific findings. Their platform hosts a global community of leading science, technology, and medical researchers who come together to expedite and provide peer-to-peer support for research projects, support career development, and drive the distribution of discoveries.

“The wave of the future is for collaboration and communication in science to be done completely online. With the internet, print journals are completely obsolete. iamscientist.com takes it a step further with crowd-sourced funding”

“Our mission is to transform the pace of discovery by providing a new platform to fund and share research,” said Dr. Borya Shakhnovich, a former professor of Bioinformatics and Founder of iAMscientist. We believe that everyone has a stake in research that supports scientific discovery. It is that dedication which helps validate the projects to the general public. While we have seen similar systems created for other disciplines, such as the Arts, this is the first platform of its kind dedicated specifically for science, technology, and medicine.”

Peter Mills, Environmental Physicist and researcher who has supported two research projects and submitted one of his own for funding, is looking to iAMscientist to fill the void in scientific research funding. “The wave of the future is for collaboration and communication in science to be done completely online. With the internet, print journals are completely obsolete. iamscientist.com takes it a step further with crowd-sourced funding,” noted Peter Mills on his website.

iAMscientist was born out of the observation that the way research progresses towards discovery is changing. New tools, better models, and faster data collection techniques all serve to make research interdisciplinary, collaborative, data driven, and much less predictable. As a result, new directions and new hypotheses often arise without published preliminary evidence. However, these are the ideas that have the potential to become the discoveries that change the way we live, cure diseases, and interact with each other.

At the heart of iAMscientist is the Open Access Funding Platform (OAFP), a crowdfunding platform that adapts a successful formula used by artists, musicians and filmmakers on Kickstarter to research. The OAFP is a peer-to-peer platform. Researchers can propose tightly-defined projects with clear goals and objectives. Once the project is approved by iAMscientist the researcher can solicit the funding required to carry out their project. As researchers support one another they make the “crowd” bigger and create a vibrant new source of research funding.

Robotic Hand Rehabilitation is an example of a project recently accepted by iAMscientist and is led by Patrick J. Murphy of Northeastern University. The National Stroke Association estimates that 795,000 strokes will occur this year, and that there are 7,000,000 stroke survivors in the United States over age 20. Approximately 50% of stroke patients lose some amount of motor control, often in the hand. Robotic training is a new technology that shows great potential for application in “neurorehabilitation” as it has several advantages related to motivation, adaptability, data collection, and the ability to provide intensive individualized repetitive practice.

With more than 100 projects submitted from researchers from over a dozen different countries and 70 currently slated to go live over the next few months, iAMscientist provides a platform to foster scientific innovation and create an interdependent global network of scientists and researchers. Individuals looking to propose a project, or fund an existing one, can sign up and join a community of more than 16 million like-minded individuals at iAMscientist.com.

About iAMscientist

iAMscientist is a global community of science, technology, and medical researchers who come together to accelerate research, support career development, and drive the distribution of discoveries. They welcome participation from everyone passionate about the next big idea. Founded in 2012 and privately held, iAMscientist is headquartered in Bedford, MA. For more information, please visit iAMscientist.com.