Action-oriented climate optimism toward a thriving planet. This is our home world.

Why biotech?

Our climate problem has deep roots in biology. Growth of food, health of soil, and stability of ecosystems are all intrinsically biological. The fossil resources we use to make fuel, materials, and chemicals all originate from organisms. The flux of the carbon cycle is dominated by biological processes. And even the slow carbon cycle, which moves carbon from the atmosphere and oceans into rock on geologic timescales, is catalyzed by living things.

The mechanisms underlying those processes can be purposed toward a healthy planet and human way of life.

Many biologists originally studied biology because they love the life that evolved here on Earth, and many biotechnologists studied biotech because they wanted to improve human lives. We are seeing that this same care for life is now motivating many biologists – including ourselves – to work toward a thriving future for all of life in the face of global climate change.

Through our own journeys, we have identified three core theses and corresponding focus areas that guide our efforts to enable the climate biotech community to reach its potential for impact.

Homeworld theses:

A growing number of people want to work in climate biotech, but are hindered by a lack of collaborators and clear direction.

Initial ideas need support getting off the ground — especially those of people who are talented but new to working in the field of climate biotech.

As an emerging field, climate biotech needs intellectual infrastructure such as guiding principles, established paths to impact and community knowledge to help us prioritize and solve problems.

Our Focus:

Community building

A community is a network of meaningful connections and joint interests. Homeworld Collective fosters the growth of the emerging climate biotech community by supporting relationship development, sharing common challenges, and co-creating knowledge.

Thought leadership

Where is the go-to knowledge for biotechnologists trying to make planetary-scale impact? We skip the paywalls and siloed career tracks to produce community knowledge that accelerates all of us in our journeys to build climate-positive technologies.

Catalyzing action

Let’s get good ideas into motion as quickly as possible, and learn together while we’re at it. We fund technology development and translatable research in climate biotech, using an open review process that generates community knowledge while refining actionable projects.

Our journey

In graduate school, initially inspired by the challenge of atmospheric carbon dioxide removal, we saw that climate change presented a series of technological challenges that we could actually work on. Encouraged by the hyperproductivity of the medical biotech community, we were determined to apply the tools of synthetic biology and genomics to emerging problems in climate. We formed an oddball ‘climate change subgroup’ in the neurotechnology lab where we did our PhDs. However, we lacked the collaborators and community knowledge of problems and paths to impact that we had enjoyed in medical biotech. That made it hard to identify the right projects and get started. As we traversed our personal paths and met others along the way, we learned that those problems are faced systemically in climate biotech.

We started Homeworld Collective in 2023 to serve the needs of our community by developing the social, intellectual, and funding infrastructure needed for the young field of climate biotech to become as hyperproductive as the exemplar fields of medical biotech and machine learning.

Who we are

Daniel Goodwin, PhD

Executive Director, Co-Founder

Paul Reginato, PhD

Founding Scientist, Co-Founder

Paul Himmelstein

Operations Director

Ariana Caiati

Program Associate

Jayme Feyhl-Buska, PhD

Program Lead - Geobiotechnology

Sarah Daniels, PhD

Program Lead - Pollution

Kaila Sims-Austin

Operations Coordinator

Founding Board

Daniel Goodwin, PhD

Executive Director & Board Member

Paul Reginato, PhD

Founding Scientist & Board Member

Sarah Sclarsic, MSc

Founding Board Member. Founder, Managing Partner of Voyager Capital.

Tony Kulesa, PhD

Founding Board Member. Principal at Pillar VC and co-founder of biotech incubator Petri.

Judy Savitskaya, PhD

Founding Board Member. Diligence Lead at Frontier Carbon Removal.

Josh Moser

Founding Board Member. Co-founder of Tezza Foods.

Advisory Board

Isha Datar, PhD

Founder of New Harvest

Isha became the Executive Director New Harvest in 2013 to build the field of cell-based agriculture. Her organization successfully empowered motivated students inside regenerative biology labs to apply their knowledge to climate and food challenges. Beyond the science, Isha and her team made important advancements in agreements and funding protocols that can be highly valuable to Homeworld’s granting offerings.

George Church, PhD

Professor at Harvard Medical School

George has been ranked by some as the most famous scientist alive, playing a major role in bringing biology into the genomics age. Accolades aside, he is known for extremely big thinking while also making time to encourage creativity in younger generations of scientists.

Erika DeBenedictis, PhD

Founder of Align To Innovate

Erika is the Group Leader of the Biodesign Lab at the Crick Institute and a global leader in protein engineering. Her organization, Align to Innovate, aims to accelerate protein engineering by driving adoption of AI and programmable, open-source experiments. Erika brings technical and strategic expertise that will be important for Homeworld’s focus on protein engineering’s deployment to climate-relevant challenges.

Drew Endy, PhD

Professor at Stanford University and Director of iGEM Foundation

Drew is a thought leader and community-builder who has shaped culture and accelerated progress in synthetic biology. He is known for inspiring those around him and making dreams feel possible. He launched and leads the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, which draws talent into synthetic biology by engaging teams of undergraduate students and makes synthetic biology accessible and collaborative. Drew brings knowledge of how to scale a technology movement through a community-first approach.

Anastasia Gamick

Co-Founder of Convergent Research

Anastasia builds Focused Research Organizations: $50MM, 5-year, non-profit team science efforts that aim to bridge gaps to unlock new technologies. Convergent has started ~6 FROs and counting. Anastasia has extensive Operations experience in both startups and science organization building, and brings an important lens of clarity and execution.

David Lang

Executive Director of the Experiment Foundation

David is well known in the metascience space for his commitment to guiding science into the next generation. His blog and podcast, Science Better, is well known throughout the field. While Experiment.com is known for its crowdfunding, it has done subtle but critical work in science communication, which we aim to learn from in Homeworld.

Loren Looger, PhD

Professor at UCSD/HHMI

Loren is a legendary figure in protein engineering, particularly in the context of neuroscience. He is known for being a free thinker while also highly successful in traditional academia. He has been an active mentor and supporter to Paul and Dan since they began their work in climate biotech.

Raman Talwar

Co-Founder and CTO Gate Therapeutics

Raman is a 3x founder of cutting-edge biotech startups. He has worked at both Third Rock and Flagship Pioneering, which trained him in the current gold-standard venture creation playbook. In addition to his executive work, he is an excellent coach for entrepreneurs and brings a clarity to startup thinking that will be impactful in climate biotech.

Eric Ward, PhD

President/CEO of AgBiome

Eric is a plant molecular biologist and world-class executive in the AgTech industry who is dedicated to advancing agricultural biotechnology. He is also the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Danforth Plant Center and a Director of Two Blades Foundation. Eric brings a creativity and knowledge of challenges across all stages of company growth that is essential for supporting climate biotech issues.

Antonius Gagern, PhD

Executive Director at the Carbon to Sea Initiative

Antonius has done gold-standard field-building work in ocean alkalinity enhancement. Starting with a seminal report with CEA consulting in 2019, and later through philanthropic program management and coalition-building at Additional Ventures, Antonius has accelerated the field by funding research and building community. He brings knowledge of the challenges and strategy involved in nurturing nascent fields and leveraging aligned funders.

Erika Reinhardt

Co-founder, Spark Climate

Erika is a technology leader and philanthropist who co-founded Spark Climate in order to build communities around emerging high-leverage problems in climate (eg, atmospheric methane removal). Spark is a gold-standard leader in technology roadmapping, coalition-building, and field-building. Erika brings a strategic perspective to Homeworld’s growth.