The University of California San Diego (UCSD) has received a massive $15 million donation in the form of the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) from the Balvi Filantropic Fund. The foundation is directed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and aims to provide funding to high-value COVID-19 projects that traditional funding sources tend to overlook.
The USDC donation is the largest gift of its kind to a U.S. University and will be used to establish the Meta-Institute for Airborne Disease in a Changing Climate, or “The Airborne Institute.”
An avenue to develop state of the art treatment methods
The newly established institute will focus on studying airborne diseases such as influenza, tuberculosis, and COVID-19, with the ultimate goal of developing new treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics while also improving the understanding of how these diseases are spread.
The Airborne Institute will be housed in the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences and will work in collaboration with healthcare experts to develop state-of-the-art measurements and computational tools to study airborne diseases.
The director of the Balvi Filantropic Fund, Vitalik Buterin, expressed his pleasure in supporting the creation of the institute and its goal of growing scientific knowledge about airborne diseases. The institute’s research will be published in open-access journals, and intellectual property developed by the institute will be published in the public domain.
The institute’s establishment comes at a crucial time, with the world still grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for better understanding and treatment of airborne diseases. The Airborne Institute’s focus on sharing its research freely and openly will allow for changes to infrastructure and policy that can benefit people worldwide.
Overall, the donation and establishment of The Airborne Institute mark a significant step in the fight against airborne diseases and underscore the importance of public-private partnerships in advancing scientific knowledge and developing new treatments and vaccines.