Institute for Progress (IFP) — 2023 Year in Review

Happy holidays from the IFP team! As we enter a new year, we thought it would be fun to look back at some of our highlights from 2023. But before we do, we want to celebrate the amazing new team members who joined this year:

• Matthew Esche, Metascience Fellow

• Tim Hwang, Senior Technology Fellow

• Amy Nice, Distinguished Immigration Counsel

• Brian Potter, Senior Infrastructure Fellow

• Santi Ruiz, Senior Editor

As well as our new Non-Resident Senior Fellows Chad Jones (Stanford University) and Chris Snyder (Dartmouth College) and our Non-Resident Fellows Maxwell Tabarrok, Patrick Collard, Janika Schmitt, and Hamidah Oderinwale. You can explore the rest of the team here.

Without further ado, here are 10 of our biggest moments this year:

1. IFP signed an exciting partnership with the National Science Foundation to test new mechanisms for funding research and innovation.

   • Co-founder Caleb Watney spoke with Nature about the types of questions our team will tackle in collaboration with NSF.

2. Caleb testified before Congress on how best to deploy federal R&D funds for artificial intelligence.

3. Immigration Fellows Lindsay Milliken and Jeremy Neufeld released a major report that developed the “Help Wanted Index,” a data-driven way to measure labor shortages and target employment-based green cards with co-author Greg Wright.

   • The authors also wrote an associated op-ed in The Washington Post, explaining how this new method could inform the update of the Department of Labor’s “Schedule A” shortage occupation list.

4. Senior Editor Santi Ruiz launched Statecraft, an interview series about how policymakers actually get things done. Start with these three:

   • How to Run Good DARPA Programs

   • How to Use Challenge Prizes

   • How to Save Twenty Million Lives

5. Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter continued crushing it with his Construction Physics newsletter. Here are a few great posts:

   • The Story of Titanium

   • Building Apollo

   • The Birth of the Grid

6. Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang started Macroscience, a newsletter on the political economy and grand strategy of science policy. Some recommended articles:

   • Antitrust in the Marketplace of Ideas

   • Long Science

   • Will Funders Have the Patience to Reform Science?

7. Our biosecurity team continued to formalize the lessons of Operation Warp Speed to see how we can achieve the same success in other policy areas:

   • Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza explained ​​How To Reuse the Operation Warp Speed Model.

   • Arielle had a related Washington Post op-ed with Co-founder Alec Stapp about Project NextGen.

   • Along with 1Day Sooner, we hosted the second annual Operation Warp Speed 2.0 conference.

8. Our infrastructure team drilled into the potential of geothermal energy with our friends at Employ America in a 4-part series called “Hot Rocks,” explaining how policymakers can jumpstart the next-gen geothermal revolution by applying lessons learned from shale.

   • Part I: The Technological Innovations that Produced the Shale Revolution

   • Part II: How Public Policy Accelerated the Shale Revolution

   • Part III: Barriers to Next-Gen Geothermal

   • Part IV: The Policy Interventions that Could Boost Geothermal

9. With our friends at the Economic Innovation Group, we hosted the #EconTwitterIRL conference at Adam Ozimek’s bowling alley in Lancaster, PA.

10. Brian and Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro wrote a landmark report arguing that indoor air quality is the next great public health challenge, and laid out a roadmap for tackling it.

    • And here’s their op-ed in STAT News.

We want to wish a deep and heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped make our work possible this year. We’re excited to build on this momentum in 2024 and continue making… progress.🫡

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