We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation has awarded HeadLamp Research a Small Business Innovation Research grant.  The NSF SBIR grant helps small companies to pursue

high-quality projects on important scientific, engineering, or science/engineering education problems and opportunities that could lead to significant commercial and public benefit, if the research is successful.

We believe HeadLamp Research will fundamentally change the way that research is done — for scientists and for everyone who wants to be able to quickly and easily reach out to people all over the world and ask them questions.  We’re glad to have the NSF’s support in developing our research platform.

The NIH has just announced a great new tool for clinical trials and other IRB-approved research!  ResearchMatch.org allows people interested in participating in research to sign up to learn about specific studies they might want to participate in.  It also lets researchers to use the system to recruit participants for their research.  In contrast to our online research focus, this tool fills a gap in research done in the laboratory, where it can also be very hard for researchers to recruit study participants.

Despite being administered by the NIH, ResearchMatch.org is for any IRB-approved researcher (not just clinical trials).  It contrasts in that way with research-participant match-up site ClinicalTrials.gov.  Another difference between the sites is that ClinicalTrials.gov makes the participant do the work of finding research they’re interested in participating in, while ResearchMatch.org makes it the job of the researchers to contact participants that match their needs (the system protects potential participants’ personal information however).

Currently, the site only allows researchers to use the system if their university or institution is a participating member.  But they’re encouraging researchers to sign up for information and express interest even if their institution is not currently participating; I don’t know if the site will eventually stop being mediated by institutions, or if they’re just hoping to get lots more institutions to sign up soon.

A side effect of the institution model is that opportunities are sparse in some parts of the U.S., and if you’re interested in participating in research in those regions, you may be out of luck for a while.  But I don’t know, maybe the network will grow fast — this tool seems like a terrific idea, and I hope lots of research institutions, researchers, and people interested in participating all sign up.

I also hope that if this system is successful, other countries will emulate it. For that matter, maybe the U.S. is lagging behind here and other countries already have such systems; does anyone know of such research matchmaking sites elsewhere?

Hey,  everyone! For our inaugural blog post, I’d like to tell you a bit about who we are, and what to expect from our company and our blog.

I’m Lauren Schmidt.  I’ve got a background in cognitive science research as well as computer science, and I’ve spent many hours hacking together online experiments using various online tools that were built without scientists in mind — as well as coding experiments from scratch.  I’ve also spent lots of hours trying to recruit participants to come into the lab for experiments, and working to make our schedules align.  Now I’d like to make everyone else’s research a lot easier, as well as my own.   That’s why I’ve co-founded HeadLamp Research.   Working with me on this project is Hilary Mason.  She’s a professor of computer science and an experienced developer who has a history of building technical tools to help people access and analyze data.  We both want to make people’s lives easier and more fun.

We’re setting up an online platform that’s powerful enough for all researchers to design studies on, while also being easy to use — whether or not you have any programming experience.  We’re also going to essentially play matchmaker for researchers and participants; if you’re a researcher who needs participants for a study, we’ll help you find the people you need, with the demographics and skills you require.  If you want to participate in some fun studies and make some money, we’ll make it simple for you to find rewarding studies to participate in.  We’ll  make payment easy as well.

In this blog, we’ll keep you updated about the development of our research tools.  We’ll also be discussing the needs of researchers online, the demographics and interests of people participating in studies online, and other data we collect or run across in our own research.  We’ll be showing some graphs and figures, because we love data!

Stick around!  We’re looking forward to sharing our ideas and hearing yours.