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Early Adopter Program

The MESA early-adopter program targets 100–200 prototype users in Year 1 and 300–500 prototype-validated users by Year 2. Year-3 expansion to 1,500–2,500 production users is deferred to the follow-on operations proposal.

Target communities

The three anchor communities provide direct user populations and feedback:

  • ESIIL — Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab (CU Boulder, DBI-2153040). Environmental science.
  • NCEMS — National Center for Ecological Microbiology Synthesis (Penn State, DBI-2335029). Microbiology.
  • AIIRA — AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture (Iowa State, NIFA-1027030). Agriculture.

In addition, MESA welcomes individual researchers and groups across NSF directorates whose science would benefit from cross-domain data integration grounded in metadata.

What you get

  • Hosted MCP access to the MESA prototype on Jetstream-2.
  • CyVerse Data Store allocation through MESA's leveraged 5.2 PB iRODS.
  • Direct support: dedicated Slack channels, monthly office hours.
  • Co-authorship and training opportunities through the Educator Fellows program.

What we ask in return

  • Feedback — bug reports, feature requests, usability notes.
  • A Letter of Support (target: ≥ 8 by Month 24) for the follow-on NSF operations proposal.
  • Citations for publications enabled by the prototype.

→ Full details: Early Adopters onboarding

Project-wide activities