The lab

Our laboratory is a lawn.

Founded eleven years ago on a municipal playing field, the Touch Grass Institute has no building, no roof and no funding. It has a very nice lawn, and a goose.
Our mission

To prove what everyone already suspected.

Most research begins with a question. Ours begins with an answer, which we find makes the rest of the work much more relaxing. We are not here to discover whether grass is good for you. We are here to find increasingly specific reasons why.

The Institute publishes four times a year, or whenever it is sunny, whichever comes first. That works out to nineteen and a half papers a year, which tells you how often it is sunny here. In winter we publish reviews of the previous summer, written indoors, with some resentment.

Staff

The people (and goose) behind the science

Director

Dr. Maren Field

Holds a doctorate in a field, from a field. Has touched grass every day for eleven years, and cites this, in every paper, as the reason she is still the director.

Head of field studies

Theo Lawnsdale

Lead author of TGI-042, the golf course study. Still slightly pink. Has been asked to leave four golf courses and considers each one a citation.

Statistics

Priya Sod

Responsible for every p-value the Institute has ever published. Believes 0.5 is a perfectly respectable threshold, and that significance is a state of mind.

Peer review

Professor Honk

A Canada goose. Reviews all submissions by standing on them. Has chased 31 authors, rejecting 31 papers. All 31 were resubmitted unchanged from a different part of the lawn and accepted. Not on salary; paid in bread, against our own advice.

A word from our reviewer

Professor Honk, on the record

Asked for a comment on the Institute's eleventh year of research, Professor Honk walked slowly toward our interviewer with her neck lowered and her wings half open. We have taken this as a strong endorsement.

Please do not feed geese bread. It is bad for them. The Institute knows this and does it anyway, which we acknowledge is not very scientific.

A portrait of a Canada goose wearing small round reading glasses, standing on a stack of papers on a lawn. One paper under its foot is stamped ACCEPTED.
Professor Honk, Chair of Peer Review, during a typical review.