← Fellow Signal dashboardSourcing Radar

Sourcing Radar

The rest of the site answers what is happening at the frontier. This answers where to look next, which research communities to call into. Pick an emerging research area and get a sourcing packet: where the US research is concentrated and rising, why now, what is technically hard (the company-thesis territory), and how present Activate already is. Built from OpenAlex; institutions and areas only, deliberately not individuals.

Research areaActivate presentBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular BiologyT10015
Why now
The field's share of publications is up ~4.45x over the past several years; the federal funding signal is rising (x11, $1928M); Activate is already in this space. Recurring bottlenecks: throughput, cost, contamination.
Where to look
US research-institution hotspots, scored by output × specialization × growth (not raw count)
1University of California, Santa Cruzeducation · 157 papers since 2022 · ×1.6 growth
2National Center for Biotechnology Informationfacility · 74 papers since 2022 · ×0.9 growth
3Rockefeller Universityeducation · 63 papers since 2022 · ×2.2 growth
4University of California, Berkeleyeducation · 185 papers since 2022 · ×1.1 growth
5Howard Hughes Medical Institutefacility · 118 papers since 2022 · ×1 growth
6Joint Genome Institutefacility · 97 papers since 2022 · ×0.9 growth
7University of California San Diegoeducation · 187 papers since 2022 · ×0.8 growth
8Johns Hopkins Universityeducation · 158 papers since 2022 · ×1 growth
What's technically hard
Recurring constraint terms in a sample of 120 recent papers (most-cited), keyword-matched, the company-thesis territory
throughput6
e.g. “Next-Generation Sequencing Technology: Current Trends and Advancements”
cost5
e.g. “Ultrafast one‐pass FASTQ data preprocessing, quality control, and deduplication using fastp”
contamination5
e.g. “Ultrafast one‐pass FASTQ data preprocessing, quality control, and deduplication using fastp”
reproducibility3
sensitivity3
Signals
Research growth×4.45 share growth (vs ~7y ago)
Federal fundingrising (x11, $1928M)
Activate presencein this space
Evidence quality
Topic matchby OpenAlex topic ID
US institution coveragestrong
Funding matchmatched keyword
Abstract coverage91% of sampled papers

A candidate surface for human curation, not a ranking to act on blindly. Institutions only, no individuals, and US-scoped (the global ranking points at institutions Activate doesn't recruit from). Hotspots cover universities, national labs, and academic medical centers, where pre-company research happens. OpenAlex topic-to-institution attribution is imperfect, so a recognizable institution is the signal; an unfamiliar one may be a tagging artifact. Bottleneck terms are keyword-matched.

Phase 1. The roadmap, including coauthor-network scouting and citation-velocity rising-author detection (gated on disambiguation rigor), is in the proposal. See the live data in the dashboard.