Stall Catchers is celebrating its 8 year anniversary!

Oh, and I'm back... For now at least! 😜

Hello to all past, current and future catchers! For those who don't know me - I am Eglė, co-founder of Stall Catchers. And for those who do - HI, I've missed you all so much! 💜

It just so co-incided that I have the honor to return (after 3 years of being MIA - sorry!) right on the birthday of Stall Catchers. It's hard to believe it's been 8 years already!

So... how did it start?

Here's what we said then, in October 2016, on our very first post on this blog:

We have just released our first game - Stall Catchers - and we are ready to get this party started! Anyone can play the game to speed up Alzheimer's research - no age limit or other possible excuses exist!

Truly, no possible excuses exist, and we've had an amazing community of catchers through these years, which has now grown to... (drum roll 🥁) more than 80 000!!!

The game was created to not just speed up, but enable Alzheimer's research at Cornell University, which otherwise would not have been possible due to very labor intensive data analysis.

❝ Stall Catchers really enables us do to experiments that we wouldn't have been able to do before.❞ - said Nozomi Nishimura in this video interview from 2018

Labor intensive in the lab, but super fun and and engaging for us, citizen scientists, am I right?!

Since the big launch, we've been speeding up Alzheimer's every day with all of your help: we've analyzed over 20 datasets, which resulted in 3 scientific publications (❗) directly supporting Alzheimer's research, and much more science still in the works. And, giving credit where its due, YOU are all co-authors of these articles!

I am now finding more than 20 scientific publications mentioning Stall Catchers, including articles, posters and even books!! We are totally making history here, and I am so proud of what we have achieved together in these (short?) 8 years. 🫶

What's next?

A lot has happened and morphed over the years in Stall Catchers – for example, with your help, machine learning algorithms can now do more quality work on analysing data. But more work yet remains for humans, don't worry! 😃

We will have a new challenge in the game soon, aiming to see how catcher ecosystem succession is affecting our "magic number". AND we have multiple projects in the pipeline that build on the success of Stall Catchers, so we will soon need your help on those too!

More news coming soon, so stay tuned. Best to all you catchers & fans - it's good to be back! 🚀