Funding Type: Grants

University of California, Berkeley — Alternative Meats Lab (2024)

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $800,000 over two years to UC Berkeley to support the Alternative Meats Lab (Alt:Meat Lab), housed at The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.

This funding will support Alt:Meat Lab’s research on challenges to manufacturing plant-based meat, as well as enable the university to offer more classes about meat alternatives.

This follows our October 2021 support and falls within our focus area of farm animal welfare, specifically within our interest in alternatives to animal products.

University of California, Berkeley — AI Alignment Workshop

Photo courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley

Open Philanthropy recommended a gift of $26,000 to UC Berkeley to support a small workshop bringing together experts in computational social choice theory and AI alignment. Professor Wesley H. Holliday will organize the workshop, and participants will discuss AI alignment and AI as a tool for democracy. The grant will also allow Dr. Jobst Heitzig, a co-organizer of the workshop, to attend three related machine learning conferences.

This falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

University of California, Berkeley — Aging Research (Irina Conboy) (2023)

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $3,042,600 over three years to UC Berkeley to support research led by Dr. Irina Conboy on the mechanisms of aging.

In her previous work, Dr. Conboy has identified ten new biomarkers and a set of pathways that may potentially be involved in the repression of biological renewal and repair in older mice and humans. This grant will fund the development of tools to trace tissue-specific changes associated with aging and rejuvenation through blood “dilution” techniques (e.g. apheresis, therapeutic blood exchange, and albumin replacement) in mice.

We hope this work will contribute to our understanding of the biology of aging and could identify druggable targets that might be better suited for future clinical trials.

This follows our June 2019 support, falls within our work on scientific research (specifically within our interest in advancing transformative basic science), and is a product of our investigation into research on the mechanisms of aging.

University of California, Berkeley — PAVITRA Pollution Modeling Tool

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $1,308,342 over three years to the University of California, Berkeley to support their work on modeling air pollution in South Asia.

UC Berkeley will be working to develop a modeling tool called PAVITRA (air Pollution mAnagement and interVentIon Tool foR IndiA) in collaboration with the Center for Study of Science, Technology, and Policy, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and the University of Washington. This is one of four grants we will be making to support this collaboration.

PAVITRA will pair an inventory of emissions in India with a modeling platform that converts changes in emissions to changes in pollution concentrations. This tool will make it much easier to understand the pollution and health impacts of interventions targeting a given source of emissions.

We see a lack of cost-benefit analysis as a major gap in air quality management in India and the rest of South Asia. We anticipate that PAVITRA may be used by policymakers or researchers to improve their policy analyses and prioritize the most impactful policies, with a high impact on health outcomes in expectation.

This grant falls within our focus area of South Asian air quality.

Trevor Woolley — Effective Altruism Economics Course 

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $10,350 to Trevor Woolley to teach a course titled “How to analyze EA causes using the tools of economics” at the University of California, Berkeley.

We sought applications for this funding to support the development of courses on a range of topics that are relevant to certain areas of Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking.

This falls within our focus area of growing and empowering the community of people focused on global catastrophic risk reduction.

UC Berkeley — Research on Labor Market Outcomes

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $50,000 to the University of California, Berkeley to support research by Professor David Card and Professor Jesse Rothstein on the effect of location, including living in large metro areas, on labor market outcomes.

This falls within our focus area of land use reform.

UC Berkeley — In-Line Water Chlorination Devices (Amy Pickering) (2021)

Researchers install a water purification device in Kenya. Courtesy of Amy Pickering

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $1,900,000 to UC Berkeley to support work led by Amy Pickering to develop and evaluate low-cost in-line water chlorination devices. Such devices could improve drinking water quality in low-resource settings and lessen the burden of diarrheal disease.

This follows our October 2020 support and falls within our work on scientific research, specifically within our interest in advancing human health and wellbeing.

UC Berkeley — Follow-Up Research on Cash Transfers Study

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $1,397,102 to the University of California, Berkeley to support research following up on a randomized controlled trial of GiveDirectly’s unconditional cash transfer program in Kenya, to study the program’s longer-term effects, such as changes to child mortality and possible spillover effects on households that didn’t receive cash. This research will be led by Edward Miguel and Michael Walker of UC Berkeley and Dennis Egger of the University of Oxford.

This grant was made on GiveWell’s recommendation. See GiveWell’s page on this grant for more details.

UC Berkeley — Tuberculosis Research

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $84,760 to the University of California, Berkeley to support Dr. Allison Roberts’ research on tuberculosis as she finishes her Life Sciences Research Foundation (LSRF) fellowship. We previously supported Allison as a member of the 2018 LSRF cohort, and we believe her research on inflammatory signaling responses to tuberculosis infections will add important information to the field.

This falls within our focus area of scientific research, specifically within our interest in advancing human health and wellbeing.