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Coral, Ferrets, and Elephant Poop: Celebrating 5 Years of the Catalyst Science Fund

By January 3, 2024July 16th, 2024No Comments
Coral shot underwater | Shutterstock
Revive & Restore’s Bridget Baumgartner joins Promega’s Jordan Villanueva to explore 5 years of collaboration through Revive & Restore’s Catalyst Science Fund. This program has awarded more than 70 grants to researchers applying biotechnology tools to support genetic rescue of endangered species. The fund was launched in 2018 with a $3 million pledge from Promega.

“We are expanding the toolkit available for conservation,” says Bridget Baumgartner, Director of Research and Development at Revive & Restore. “We’re a technology-focused organization with a network of technology experts – we’re here to help make researchers in this space as successful as possible.”

Bridget manages the Catalyst Science Fund for Revive & Restore. Projects supported by the Catalyst Science Fund have cloned a black footed ferret, developed methods for analyzing population genetics of isolated elephant herds, and much more.

“The donation from Promega enabled us to demonstrate that this long-term ‘Go Big or Go Home’ approach can create new capabilities that are going to be high-impact for wildlife conservation,” Bridget says.

Read the full article

About the Program

The goal of the Catalyst Science Fund is to advance the development of new biotechnology tools to help solve conservation’s most intractable problems. Launched in 2018 with a $3 million pledge from biotech company Promega, the Catalyst Science Fund is designed to hasten impactful innovations in conservation. A key barrier to the adoption of genomic solutions by the conservation community has been the lack of success stories. To that end, we created the Catalyst Science Fund to support early-stage, transformative bio-science research and proof-of-concept projects. Now over $20 million, the fund continues to create new avenues for the successful restoration of wildlife through the application of biotechnology innovation.

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