Every gift we receive helps us reach our goals. We will unveil the first university research projects in March 2008. Over the next year, we will expand breadth and depth of the projects avaialble through makingprogress.org as well as the capabilities of our Open Donation Platform.

Please contribute to Making Progress and help accelerate the development of our platform described below.

Over the next year, Making Progress is creating an open-source donation platform that may be used freely by any organization. We hope that such a platform will lower costs for many non-profits and enable them to communicate more effectively with their donors. We will also be using the platform to help achieve the long-term goals of our own organization. All donations to this project will be applied toward Making Progress's operating costs.

Millions of people suffer from chronic pain from arthritis, cancer, neuropathic injury, or other reasons, which can disrupt livelihoods and severely impair quality of life. Our lab has developed a technology which can, in principle, selectively and reversibly silence pain neurons in humans. We seek $10,000 to pursue an initial proof of concept of a device that could allow people to turn off chronic, debilitating pain, while not disrupting normal, adaptive pain sensing. Initial designs will be implanted, using safe and effective optical sensitizers our lab has developed, but future versions will aim to be noninvasive.