Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is an American foundation established by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and his wife Betty I. Moore in September 2000^[2] to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements and preservation of the character of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Moore Foundation logo
Founded	2000; 25 years ago (2000)
Founder	Gordon E. Moore and Betty I. Moore
Focus	Environmental conservation Patient Care Science San Francisco Bay Area
Location	Palo Alto, California, United States
Method	Grants
Key people	Harvey V. Fineberg, President
Budget	$365 million (annual, 2021)[1]
Endowment	$9.5 billion (2021)[1]
Website	www.moore.org

As outlined in the Statement of Founder's Intent,^[3] the foundation's aim is to tackle large, important issues at a scale where it can achieve significant and measurable impacts.

According to the OECD, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation provided US$60 million for development in 2020 by means of grants.^[4]

Funded projects

Astronomy

• All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN)
• Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)
• Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA)
• South Pole Telescope (SPT)
• Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT)
• W. M. Keck Observatory^[5]
• BICEP and Keck Array

Biology

• Advanced Imaging Center (AIC) | Janelia Research Campus
• Center for Ocean Solutions^[6]
• Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis
• Foldscope
• Global Ocean Sampling Expedition
• iNaturalist

Quantum materials

• Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems Initiative^[7]

Data-driven discovery

• Jupyter^[8]
• Julia (programming language)^[9]
• Data Carpentry^[10]
• NumPy Python Package
• Numba Python Package
• Dask Python Package
• R Consortium in support of R programming language projects

Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments

Source:^[11]

• Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)^[12]
• NYU Center for Data Science^[13]
• UW eScience Institute^[14]

Marine Microbiology Initiative (initiative ending in 2021)

Source:^[15]

• Investigator awards for high-risk microbial ecology research (2012)^[16]

Other (standalone) projects

• ASAPBio^[17]
• Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing | UC Davis
• PLOS (Public Library of Science)
• Wikidata

Controversies

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has contributed US$200 million towards construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope.^[18] A proposed extremely large telescope (ELT), the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is considered controversial due to its planned location on Mauna Kea, which is considered sacred land according to the native Hawaiians, on the island of Hawaii in the United States. Native Hawaiian cultural practice and religious rights are the main points of opposition towards the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope,^[19] along with concerns over the lack of meaningful dialogue during the permitting process.^[20]

On October 7, 2014, protesters demonstrated outside the headquarters of the foundation in Palo Alto, California.^[21][22] On July 14, 2019, protesters had created an online petition titled "The Immediate Halt to the Construction of the TMT Telescope" that was posted on Change.org and directed towards the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as well as other financial backers. The online petition gathered over 278,057 signatures worldwide.^[23]

See also

• List of wealthiest charitable foundations