Introducing Projects

We're excited to announce Projects, a new way to organize your funding search in Atom and one of the biggest upgrades we've made to grant matching.

Until now, Atom matched grants to a person: your profile held one set of research interests, and those interests drove one feed. That works well when your research follows a single line. Many of the people we work with, though, are balancing several: a PI running three distinct programs, a lab applying for funding as a team, a research office supporting researchers across an entire institution.

Projects is built for exactly that. A project represents one funding effort, and it carries everything the search needs: the research interests that drive matching, the eligibility Atom checks against every grant, the team working on it, and a shared list of saved grants. Your feed, your search results, your grant emails, and your eligibility checks all follow whichever project you're working in.

Who it is for

• Researchers with more than one line of work see the benefit immediately. If you study both CRISPR delivery and rural health outcomes, those can now be two projects, each with research interests specific enough to match precisely, and you can switch between them in a click.

• Teams get a shared workspace for the funding search itself, before there's a proposal to write. Everyone on a project sees the same research interests, the same eligibility verdicts, and the same saved grants. When Atom assesses whether the team qualifies for a grant, it assesses once, and the whole team sees the answer.

• Research development staff can now work on a researcher's matching directly. You can open any project belonging to a researcher you support, refine its research interests, add eligibility context, and view their feed exactly as that project sees it. Well-written research interests are the single biggest driver of feed quality, and admins can now contribute them where it counts.

What it does

Create a project in one form

1. Click Projects in the sidebar, then New project. The entire setup is a single page: name, team, eligibility, research interests, and your email preference. Press Create project and everything is ready at once, including a shared saved-grants list named after the project.

2. When naming a project, describe the research itself rather than a specific opportunity. A name like "CRISPR delivery for rare disease" captures a direction you'll pursue funding for over years, which is exactly the level a project is meant to live at.

Let Atom draft your research interests

Research interests drive the matching, so they deserve more care than any other field on the page. If you'd like a starting point, click Generate with Atom AI. Atom reads the project name and the lead PI's profile and drafts a set of interests, each pairing a method with what it's applied to. They're fully editable, and time spent refining them pays off in every match afterwards.

Editing happens inline, one line per interest, and each line saves on its own, so your matching improves with every refinement rather than waiting on a final save.

Set eligibility once, per project

Eligibility comes in two halves. The first is read live from the lead PI's profile, so it is always current, and the project page shows you exactly whose profile that is. The second is a free-text box for project-specific additions: the award runs through a 501(c)(3), the work targets a specific geography, there's a partner institution. These are facts about the project rather than the person, and they apply to everyone on the team.

Whenever either half changes, Atom refreshes its eligibility verdicts for the project's grants so they always reflect the current picture.

Bring your team in

Add collaborators from your institution and give each one a role: PI, Admin, or Collaborator. Invitations are prepared as you pick people and sent together when you're ready, so you can put the full roster in place before anyone is notified.

Invitees receive an email and arrive in Atom already signed in, with a card on their projects page waiting for them to accept. Every project has exactly one lead PI, whose profile anchors its eligibility and matching, and that role can be transferred at any time if the applicant of record changes.

The rest of Atom follows

Your dashboard now shows your projects along the top. Select one and the feed beneath switches to its matches, and search, deep research, and the eligibility tab on any grant page follow the same selection.

Each project's saved-grants list belongs to the team: joining a project grants access, leaving removes it, and there is nothing to manage by hand.

Grant emails, per project, per person

Email preferences remain individual even though the project is shared. A collaborator on three projects who only wants updates about one can mute the other two while staying on the team.

We've also restructured the emails themselves. You receive one email per send, with a section for each project and only the strongest matches in each. A grant that fits several of your projects appears once, in the section where it fits best, and a project without strong matches that week is simply left out. Your overall schedule, whether weekly, biweekly, or monthly, still lives in your notification settings.

For administrators

Every researcher's admin page now includes a Projects tab listing their projects with roles, member counts, and interest counts. Open a project to curate its research interests and eligibility directly, or use View feed to see their dashboard as that project and judge the match quality for yourself.

You can also create a project on a researcher's behalf: they become its lead PI and you join the team as an admin. This makes project setup a natural part of onboarding, and ten minutes spent writing good research interests for a new faculty member pays off in every feed and email they receive from then on.

How to get the most out of it

A few habits that help teams get value quickly:

• Create one project per line of work, not one per grant. A project is a research direction you'll pursue funding for over months or years; individual applications still live in Proposals.
• Be specific with research interests. "Ultrafast X-ray spectroscopy for quantum materials" matches far better than "materials science." If a project's interests start drifting apart, that's usually a sign it's ready to become two projects.
• Mute rather than leave. If a teammate's project isn't relevant to your inbox, muting it keeps your access to the team and its saved grants while quieting the emails.
• Admins: set up projects during onboarding. Creating a project for a new researcher, with well-chosen interests, means their very first feed is a good one.

Available now

Projects is live today for everyone with Atom Discovery. If you already had research interests, they've been moved into a project for you, so your feed keeps working exactly as before, and you can begin splitting things up whenever you're ready.

Open Projects in the sidebar to explore, or reach out to your account manager if you'd like a walkthrough. We can't wait to see what you find.