Fast Grants is an

America The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territor ...

n charity that provides funding for scientific research. The project was created in response to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

to provide quick funding to scientists working on research projects that could help with the pandemic.

History

The project was launched in April 2020 by

Tyler Cowen Tyler Cowen (; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog ''Marginal R ...

, an economics professor at

George Mason University George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was orig ...

;

Patrick Collison Patrick Collison (born 9 September 1988) is an Irish billionaire entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, which he started with his younger brother, John, in 2010. He won the 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 ...

, co-founder of

online payment An e-commerce payment system (or an electronic payment system) facilitates the acceptance of electronic payment for offline transfer, also known as a subcomponent of electronic data interchange (EDI), e-commerce payment systems have become incre ...

processing platform

Stripe Stripe, striped, or stripes may refer to: Decorations * Stripe (pattern), a line or band that differs in colour or tone from an adjacent surface * Racing stripe, a vehicle decoration * Service stripe, a decoration of the U.S. military Entertainme ...

; and Patrick Hsu, a bioengineer at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Fran ...

Support

The project is supported by donations from

Arnold Ventures Arnold Ventures LLC (formerly known as The Laura and John Arnold Foundation) is focused on evidence-based giving in a wide range of categories including: criminal justice, education, health care, and public finance. The organization was founded by ...

, The Audacious Project, The

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifetime ...

John Collison John Collison (born 6 August 1990) is an Irish billionaire entrepreneur and the co-founder and President of Stripe which he co-founded in 2010 with his brother Patrick. Collison was the youngest self made billionaire in 2016. As of 2022, accord ...

, Crankstart,

Jack Dorsey Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American Internet entrepreneur and programmer who is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc., as well as a co-founder and the CEO and chairperson of Block, Inc., the developer of the Squa ...

, Kim and Scott Farquhar, Paul Graham,

Reid Hoffman Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for pro ...

, Fiona McKean and Tobias Lütke, Yuri and Julia Milner,

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The ...

, Chris and Crystal Sacca,

Schmidt Futures Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic venture founded by Eric Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt in 2017. The philanthropy funds science and technology research and talent networking programs. The organization's grants include large-scale "moonshots". Schmidt ...

, and others.

Grants

Fast Grants provides funding between $10,000 and $500,000. The charity says they respond to applications within two days, and will also fund researchers outside the United States. As of April 2021, Fast Grants has awarded 250 grants totaling more than $50 million to researchers working on COVID-19 related projects, including testing, clinical work, surveillance, virology, drug development and trials, and PPE. Fast Grants provided initial funding for SalivaDirect, the saliva test used in the NBA “bubble” in Orlando during the 2020 season. Other notable grant recipients include

Addgene Addgene is a non-profit plasmid repository. Addgene facilitates the exchange of genetic material between laboratories by offering plasmids and their associated cloning data to not-for-profit laboratories around the world. Addgene provides a free ...

, the

Center for Open Science The Center for Open Science is a non-profit technology organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia with a mission to "increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research." Brian Nosek and Jeffrey Spies founded the o ...

Susan Athey Susan Carleton Athey (born ) is an American economist. She is the Economics of Technology Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she has been a professor at Harva ...

Carolyn Bertozzi Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi (born October 10, 1966) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate, known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with ...

, Catherine Blish,

Pamela Bjorkman Pamela Jane Bjorkman NAS, AAAS (also spelled Pamela J. Björkman; born 1956, Portland, Oregon) is an American biochemist and molecular biologist. She is the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Instit ...

Susan Daniel Susan Daniel is an American chemical engineer who is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. Her research considers membrane biophysics and bioelectronic devices. During the COVID-19 pandemic Daniel used bioele ...

Barbara Engelhardt Barbara Elizabeth Engelhardt is an American computer scientist and specialist in bioinformatics. Working as a Professor at Stanford University, her work has focused on latent variable models, exploratory data analysis for genomic data, and QTLs ...

Laura Esserman Laura Esserman is a surgeon and breast cancer oncology specialist. She is the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. She leads the I-SPY trials, Athena Breast Health N ...

, Judith Frydman,

Amy Gladfelter Amy S. Gladfelter (born April 27, 1974) is an American quantitative cell biologist who is interested in understanding fundamental mechanisms of cell organization. She was a Professor of Biology and the Associate Chair for Diversity Initiatives ...

Eva Harris Eva Harris (born August 6, 1965) is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder and president of the Sustainable Sciences Institute. She focuses her research efforts on combating diseases ...

, Akiko Iwasaki,

Kevin Kain Kevin Kain is a tropical disease expert based at the Toronto General Hospital, at which he serves as Director of the Centre for Travel and Tropical Medicine. He is a Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto, the Director of the Sandra A. Rotman ...

Yoshihiro Kawaoka is a virologist specializing in the study of the influenza and Ebola viruses. He holds a professorship in virology in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and at the University of Tokyo, Japan. ...

Nevan Krogan Nevan J. Krogan is a Canadian molecular and systems biologist. He is a professor and the Director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), as well as a senior investigator at the J. D ...

, Ronald Levy,

Allison McGeer Allison Joan McGeer (born 1953) is a Canadian infectious disease specialist in the Sinai Health System, and a professor in thDepartment of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiologyat the University of Toronto. She also appointed at the Dalla Lana S ...

Miriam Merad Miram Merad (born 1969) is a French-Algerian professor in Cancer immunology and the Director of the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute (PrIISM) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in New York, NY. She i ...

, Keith Mostov,

Mihai Netea Mihai G. Netea (born 1968, Cluj, Romania) is a Romanian Dutch physician and professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, specialized in infectious disease, immunology, and global health. Netea studied medicine at the Medico-Pharmaceutical Institute ...

Daniel Nomura Daniel K. Nomura is an American chemical biologist and Professor of Chemical Biology and Molecular Therapeutics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular & Cell Biology. His work employs chemoproteo ...

Melanie Ott Melanie Ott is a German virologist who is a senior investigator of The Ott Lab, Director the Gladstone Institute of Virology, and Senior Vice President of Gladstone Institutes. She is also a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, ...

, Bradley Pentelute,

Rosalind Picard Rosalind Wright Picard (born May 17, 1962) is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups ...

Hidde Ploegh Hidde Lolke Ploegh (born 7 January 1953) is an Immunology, immunologist at Boston Children's Hospital, known for his contributions in understanding antigen processing and the evasion of the immune system by viruses. Career and education Ploegh, a ...

Angela Rasmussen Angela Lynn Rasmussen is an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Education and early career During graduate school, Rasmussen worked in the laboratory of Vincent Ra ...

Erica Ollmann Saphire Erica Ollmann Saphire is an American structural biologist and immunologist and a professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. She investigates the structural biology of viruses that cause hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola, Sudan, Marburg ...

Katherine Seley-Radtke Katherine Seley-Radtke is an American medicinal chemist who specializes in the discovery and design of novel nucleoside or nucleotide based enzyme inhibitors that may be used to treat infections or cancer. She has authored over 90 peer-reviewed pub ...

Erec Stebbins Erec Stebbins (born 1969) is an American biomedical scientist and novelist. Head of Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Structural Microbiology from 2001 to 2016 and currently Head of Division of Structural Biology of Infection and Immunity at ...

Alice Ting Alice Yen-Ping Ting is Taiwanese-born American chemist. She is a professor of Genetics, of Biology, and by courtesy, of Chemistry at Stanford University. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator. Early life and education Alice Ting w ...

, Alain Townsend,

David Veesler David Veesler is a French biochemist and an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington, where his group focuses on the study the structural biology of infectious diseases. His team recently helped determine ...

Bert Vogelstein Bert Vogelstein (born 1949) is director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. A pi ...

Tania Watts Tania H. Watts (born 1957) is a Canadian Immunologist, Professor at the University of Toronto, past President of the Canadian Society for Immunology and from 2009-2019 held the Sanofi Pasteur Chair in Human Immunology at the University of Toront ...

, and

Qian Zhang Qian Zhang from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association f ...

. As of January 2022, new Fast Grants applications have been paused due to lack of additional funding.

References

{{reflist Charities based in the United States Organizations established for the COVID-19 pandemic Charitable activities related to the COVID-19 pandemic