Backyard Brains Receives Prestigious Tibbetts Award 2020 for “Demonstrating Significant Economic and Social Impact”

Another accolade is about to hit our shelves! The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recently announced recipients of the prestigious Tibbetts Award 2020. Backyard Brains is one of 38 companies that are deemed “beacons of promise and models of excellence in high technology.” Every year, Tibbie goes to companies, individuals and organizations “for the exceptional successes they achieved through SBA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)” program.

This recognition further fuels our mission to keep building low-fi yet research-grade neuroscience gear and bringing it into your average school classroom. The goal is to help kids dip their toes into project-based science today so that they could help cure billions of people from neurological disorders tomorrow. That’s exactly what Tibbie is all about: a mix of “economic and social impact,” of research and development to propel young companies and help them serve our communities better.

Tibbie is named after Rolland Tibbetts, a senior program officer at the National Science Foundation who founded the SBIR/STTR federal funding program for small innovative companies. Backyard Brains was and still is one of these companies. And we wouldn’t have gotten very far without the support from farsighted federal grant programs for ideas that need time to blossom into successful commercial projects.

Today, we are joining the hall of fame of hundreds of companies and organizations who have been awarded Tibbie since its inception in 1995. Indeed, some multinational giants have kicked off their journey with Tibbie, including Qualcomm, 23andMe, Symantec and Broadcom. Here’s to hoping that we’ll grow at least half as big within the next decade!

Tibbetts Award 2020 is just another star in the BYB Awards & Honors list

Since it’s bragging time, let’s boast some more! Here’s a list of the many awards and honors Backyard Brains has received over the past 12 years. (It’s not all there is, but we are not very meticulous at keeping track!)

• 2020 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Award. GS10KSB is a selective four month training program (worth $50,000) for business leadership and growth strategies.
• 2020 Invited Talk – J. James Wood Lecture – Butler University
• 2018 Collaboration with HarvardX on the largest neuroscience massive open online course “Fundamentals of Neuroscience”
• 2018 Profiled on “Bill Nye Saves the World” on Netflix for our Human-Human Interface kit
• 2018 Collaboration with TED on new video series: DIY Neuroscience. Each episode features an undergraduate student developing easy-to-use neuroscience research tools for the K12 classroom
• 2017 Invited talk at the Annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (Cosyne) 2017 Meeting
• 2017 Invited talk at TED2017 on plant electrophysiology
• 2016 Profiled on Mythbuster’s “White Rabbit Project” on Netflix for our human-based neuroscience  inventions
• 2015 TED Talk about taking away a person’s free will
• 2014 Invited Speaker at the NIMH Director’s Innovation Speaker Series
• 2014 TED Senior Fellow, 3rd talk featuring Human-Human Interface available online
• 2013 Recipient of the United States “Champions of Change” award at the White House for our work in promoting citizen science
• 2013 Nominee. 5th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival. Controlled Experiments
• 2013 Profiled on CNN’s The Next List as a forward-looking thinkers in the fields of tech, science and social change
• 2012 TED Fellow. Presented two TED talks on our work. The now famous “Cockroach Beatbox” TED talk was selected to launch the TED K12 Education initiative entitled “TED Ed”
• 2011 Start-Up Chile Fellow.  Recipient of $40k in grant funding to start operations in Latin America
• 2011 Editors Choice Award: Maker Faire Detroit
• 2010 Society for Neuroscience Next Generation Award for “outstanding contributions to public outreach and science education”
• 2010 Society for Neuroscience Anuradha Rao Memorial Travel Award
• 2010 Marine Biological Laboratory Neural Systems and Behavior course, Woods Hole, MA
• 2008 The $100 Spike Project is one of four presentations highlighted out of 10,000 for the Journal Nature’s Neuroscience Podcast “Highlights of SfN 2008”