The University of California, San Diego announced on March 7 that it has received a donation of $15 million in tokens (USDC) from a fund directed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
The Balvi Filantropic Fund "is a scientific investment and direct grant fund for the rapid deployment of high-value COVID projects often overlooked by traditional institutional or commercial sources of funding," according to its website.
According to UC San Diego, the donation is the largest cryptocurrency gift ever made to a U.S. university and the largest to date to fund open-source research on aerosols. The funds will be used to establish the Airborne Diseases in Climate Change Meta-Institute, which will also be known as the Airborne Institute. The new facility will focus on research on airborne diseases such as influenza, tuberculosis and COVID-19, UCSD said.
Its ultimate goal is to develop new treatments, vaccines and diagnostics for these diseases, while improving understanding of how they are transmitted. Buterin said: “I am pleased to support the creation of this new institute at UC San Diego, which will work to grow our scientific knowledge about airborne disease and share it freely, enabling changes to infrastructure and policy that benefit people around the globe.”
The institute will be housed in the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences. Further research by the Airborne Institute will be published in an open access journal, along with other data. Intellectual property developed by The Airborne Institute will also be released in the public domain.
