Mosaic Foundation

The MOSAIC Foundation is dedicated to making model organism research more reproducible, more equitable, and ready for the next century of faster, more reliable discovery

About MOSAIC

The MOSAIC Foundation is dedicated to strengthening reproducibility and enabling new modes of discovery in model organism biology. For more than a century, Drosophila melanogaster and, for more than fifty years, Caenorhabditis elegans have powered fundamental discoveries, often with tools and practices that were ingenious in their time but are now outdated. Worms nudged with eyelashes glued to toothpicks, flies tallied by hand as they climb their vials, and experiments left to the mercy of room conditions have carried the field surprisingly far, but they also introduce noise, slow replication, and disadvantage smaller or resource-limited labs.

MOSAIC exists to reimagine what comes next. We develop affordable, automated tools, share protocols and resources, and create opportunities for collaboration so that labs anywhere in the world can work with greater precision and reliability. We adapt proven approaches from electronics manufacturing such as automated optical inspection, standardized fixtures, and environmental controls to bring modern quality and scale to worm and fly research. These tools make experiments faster, results more reproducible, and discoveries more accessible, equipping the community for its next century of breakthroughs.

Our Founder

Barrett Comiskey is the inventor of electronic ink, first published in Nature in 1998, and co-founder of E Ink, the company behind the Amazon Kindle, the BMW Dee, and a billion Electronic Shelf Labels. He has spent thirty years commercializing new technologies and two decades in Asia building large-scale technology platforms and supply chains, launching products that have reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide. His career has spanned boardrooms, cleanrooms, and factory floors, where he learned to translate wild ideas into reliable systems and global practice.

With the MOSAIC Foundation, Barrett is applying that experience to model organism biology. He is interested in the liminal spaces where disciplines overlap and new forms of discovery emerge. By adapting proven approaches from advanced electronics and industrial-scale production, MOSAIC aims not only to improve reproducibility and global opportunity but also to unlock entirely new modes of seeing and understanding biology. The same drive that turned a whiteboard sketch into E Ink now guides his efforts to help worm and fly scientists build the next century of discovery.