Nona’s primary mission is to help broaden the adoption and impact of open-source software that can help advance the fields of synthetic biology. Advances in these fields will lead to innovations in health, energy, materials, and can fundamentally change the industrial world. However, we do recognize the great inequity that exists in the world today and will continue to propagate in the absence of a diverse community that can participate in reshaping the industrialized world.

OUR MISSION

Nona Research Foundation, Inc. was created to broaden participation, increase access, and advance innovation in the design, distribution, documentation, maintenance, and use of open-source software and tools in the fields of synthetic biology and bio-design automation.

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OUR IMPACT

Research using Nona’s software and other tools will lead to advances and improvement in health and healthcare, energy production and storage, materials manufacture, protection of the environment, and human welfare. Producing life-saving pharmaceuticals, repairing defective genes, destroying cancer cells, generating biofuels, cleaning up the environment, and assisting climate change through carbon capture, are examples of the specific applications anticipated in synthetic biology and related scientific fields enabled by Nona’s advances.

OUR ACTIVITIES

Nona’s activities will be developed to accomplish:

  • Research and development of the software, tools and associated documentation in systems that will enable scientists to design and construct a broad range of biological tools, techniques, and scientific understanding
  • Maintenance and improvement of such software, tools and associated documentation
  • Availability and accessibility of such software, tools and associated documentation, so that they are more widely and freely available to the public.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee at Nona Research Foundation actively strives to shape an atmosphere where all members of our community intentionally and confidently dismantle systemic racism, discrimination and inequity. We promise to commit to educating ourselves about issues of anti-racism and anti-discrimination and then, actively engage our knowledge and resources to end inequity by educating our colleagues, diversifying our organization and engaging with our communities

SOFTWARE PHILOSOPHY

We educate developers to adopt robust coding standards, modularity, and clear concise documentation. We promote taking ownership of issues and implementation according to governance in open-source software and benefiting from continuous integration and deployment.

Nona’s synthetic biology software follows the Specification/Design/Build/Test cycle pattern prevalent in other rigorous engineering disciplines: