Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $427,900 over two years to the University of Utah to support research led by Professors Michael Kay and Debbie Eckert on developing D-peptide antivirals against henipaviruses with pandemic potential, such as Hendra and Nipah virus.
This grant was funded via our request for proposals through the Pandemic Antiviral Discovery Initiative.
This follows our October 2022 support and falls within our focus area of biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $1,000,000 over two years to the Joep Lange Institute to support its work to expand the donor base for multilateral global health organizations through government advocacy.
This follows our May 2023 support and falls within our focus area of global aid policy.
Open Philanthropy recommended two grants totaling $4,250,000 to 80,000 Hours for general support. 80,000 Hours works to help people have more impact with their careers by providing online content and one-on-one coaching.
This follows our May 2023 support and falls within our focus area of Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $86,981 to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to support its Health Security Scholars program, which provides funding for early-career professionals to work on health security policy.
This follows our May 2023 support and falls within our work on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $400,000 to Rutgers University to support work led by Professor Nir Eyal. This project aims to advance an interdisciplinary, global conversation about the governance of life sciences research.
This falls within our focus area of biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $350,000 over two years to the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Clinic to support the development of a pilot Global Farmed Animal Benchmark, a report comparing legal protections for farm animals across countries.
This falls within our focus area of farm animal welfare.
To learn more about new approaches and strategies, we sometimes make “experimental grants”, which involve less vetting than our other grants. This is an experimental grant.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $1,680,000 to Palisade Research for general support. Palisade Research studies AI capabilities to better understand misuse risks from current systems, and how advances in hacking, deception, and persuasion will affect the risk of catastrophic AI outcomes.
This falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
The grant amount was updated in August 2024.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $50,000 to the Yale University School of Medicine to support preclinical tests on the potential of syndecan inhibition as a treatment for sepsis, led by Dr. Michael Simons. This research builds on Dr. Simons’ previous work, which found that a protein called syndecan-2 is necessary for the activity of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), another protein that can cause blood vessels to leak during severe infections. By blocking syndecan-2, researchers hope to prevent some of the dangerous complications of sepsis.
This falls within our focus area of scientific research.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $133,402 to the University of California, Santa Barbara to support a project led by Professor William Wang to build a database and taxonomy of large language model (LLM) use cases. This is one of two grants we recently made to support this work.
This grant was funded via a request for proposals for projects studying and forecasting the real-world impacts of systems built from LLMs. This falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $74,132 to the University of Minnesota to support a project to develop benchmarks for assessing large language models’ capabilities in automating legal tasks, led by Assistant Professor Dongyeop Kang.
This grant was funded via a request for proposals for projects benchmarking LLM agents on consequential real-world tasks and falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.