UC San Diego Receives Hefty Crypto Gift

The University of California in San Diego has been gifted $15 million in crypto by the Balvi Filantropic Fund, run by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. It’s easily one of the largest digital currency donations to ever be made to a school. The money will be put towards a program in which the school will perform research on aerosols.

UC San Diego Is Getting a Lot of Crypto Funds

Buterin mentioned in a statement:

Over the last several years, it has become abundantly apparent that we need more open-source scientific research to better understand airborne pathogens and pollutants and how they affect us. 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 program, specifically, will be looking into aerosolized pathogens and their impacts. This will include allergies, asthma, and COVID-19. Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla was pleased with the gift, commenting:

At UC San Diego, we translate discoveries into solutions. This generous, visionary gift will empower our world-class scientists and researchers to conduct collaborative, interdisciplinary studies of airborne diseases and pollutants with the potential to drive new discoveries to improve human health all for the greater good.

The program will be co-headed by Kim Prather, distinguished chair in atmospheric chemistry and distinguished professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego. She said:

We are excited to launch this new institute that will allow us to take a multidisciplinary approach to better understand airborne transmission of disease. Working together with health care experts, infectious disease doctors, engineers, respiratory experts, and scientists, we will be developing state-of-the-art measurements and computational tools to study these problems. A major goal is to develop a better understanding of the production and sources of airborne bioparticles and how long they remain infectious… We are beginning to investigate the aerosolized pathogens from wastewater with a focus on better understanding the health effects of inhaling these bioaerosols and waterborne pollutants. This will be a new effort combining medicine, atmospheric chemistry, engineering, and public health with the goal of ultimately improving indoor air quality for all.

Using the Money Wisely

The money will also help UC San Diego monitor all future COVID activity. Rob Knight – director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation – stated:

We have made tremendous strides in advancing technology to see pathogens in the wastewater and on surfaces and look forward to extending this to the air we breathe. Improved techniques for handling low biomass samples and for simultaneous detection of genome sequences and chemicals from the same specimen, as we have been developing for our human microbiome projects, will transform our ability to understand our environmental exposures and their positive and negative impacts on our health.

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