The foundation’s ability to take risks and make long-term and relatively large commitments should allow it to undertake challenges not accessible to many other organizations.
Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.
Measurement, evaluation and learning are part of our DNA. From the start, we have been outcomes-driven, and through the years, we’ve relied on rigorous inquiry and adaptive management to guide our work. The scope of the challenges we prioritize guarantee that results are never certain and that conditions are constantly and unpredictably changing. Comprehensive investigations, well-vetted theories of change, and honest evaluation of our impact help us make informed decisions and reveal lessons from our successes and failures.
Gordon and Betty Moore “believe that science and the type of rigorous inquiry that guides science are keys to achieving the outcomes we want. Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.”
Upholding our founders’ values and beliefs, we practice adaptive management a systematic method for project management. It integrates design, management, monitoring and evaluation to provide a framework for testing assumptions, adaptation and learning. We believe that when those closest to the work, including our own staff and grantees, use adaptive management, they can improve effectiveness and impact. Institutional curiosity, innovation and a willingness to be open to change and failure are necessary skills for this approach.
The Four Filters
To evaluate possible ideas, programmatic activities and any significant potential endeavors, we consistently ask four questions:
1. Is it important? Successfully addressing the issue will result in large positive benefit or avoidance of substantial negative consequences.
2. Can we make an enduring difference? Significant enduring impact can be achieved that would not be achieved without Foundation support.
3. Is it measurable? To track progress and confirm outcomes, measurement against goals is necessary. It is often difficult to implement, but key to our quantitative approach to philanthropy.
4. Does it contribute to a portfolio effect? Synergy can increase impact and a portfolio can decrease risks.
Investigate
Through standalone grantmaking and formal investigations, the foundation explores potential areas of opportunity to determine if and how the foundation can make an enduring difference.
By staying well-informed in our areas of focus and making decisions on the basis of knowledge, analysis, external input and objective due diligence, our program teams cultivate a pipeline of ideas that can be accelerated if funding is available.
Measure and evaluate
The Four Filters question, “Is it measurable?” is core to every funding decision we make. Given the complexity of problems we aim to tackle, we often embark on work knowing we will need to expect a time horizon of decades, rather than years, to achieve the outcomes we seek.
Early in the foundation’s history, former President Ed Pehoet, Ph.D. emphasized, ‘’each program that we fund should have a set of measurable outcomes within a decade – and I think it’s a good time frame to think about. Shorter than a decade-off is too short. Longer than a decade becomes too abstract. . . I think if you can’t measure something in 10 years probably it means it may be too big a problem or the measurements just aren’t there.”
Monitor and adapt
Defining those long-term outcomes doesn’t mean we wait a decade to measure progress. Instead, we look for intermediate results that signal whether we are on track to what we hope to achieve, and we invest in research to better understand whether our theories of change hold. In both instances, our findings may help to validate our strategic plans or alert us to the need to adapt our strategies to changing knowledge or circumstance.
For example, nearly eight years into our XX-year, $XXX million Wild Salmon Ecosystem Initiative, we funded a scientific analysis of the relationships between salmon diversity, habitat and ecology. That research affirmed that the abundance and diversity of wild salmon were not put at risk by salmon management practices reinforcing the critical importance of the strategy.
Exit responsibly
Measurement and evaluation also help us to assess when our investment in a given area may have a diminishing return. Our long-term initiatives are built upon comprehensive plans that theorize how our funding across multiple strategies will lead toward the ultimate outcome we seek. When we launched the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative in 2013, our aim was to research through support of data-driven scientists and their innovative approaches.
The initiative was responsive to research and analysis that showed a significant gap in public and private funding for data science efforts focused on the natural sciences. By investing in this area at an early stage, we helped researchers apply data science to their work and generated broader use of data science in the natural sciences across the country.
Five years into the initiative, a comprehensive external evaluation and assessment by an external expert panel in 2018 revealed that the landscape of funding for data science had shifted significantly during the course of the initiative. Those findings led us to reevaluate our funding approach. We shifted funding to solidify the gains of the initiative and boost the development and use of data science tools for the natural sciences, with the intent to close the initiative in 2021.
When they created the foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore understood the unique role it could play in our areas of focus. In their Statement of Founders’ Intent, they underscored that the foundation’s ability to “take risks and make long-term and relatively large commitments should allow it to undertake challenges not accessible to many other organizations.”
With early-stage funding and collaboration among unlikely allies, we have been able to catalyze invention, new scientific instruments, large-scale conservation, and cleaner commodity supply chains. At times, early funding gives grantees the time and space to prove their ideas to other funders
Enabling invention and inspiring scientific engagement
Curiosity is a hallmark of science. The foundation works to stoke that curiosity about the natural world at all ages. Enhanced opportunities for active engagement with science cultivates an inquisitive and open-minded public that appreciates, values and uses science. We seek to bring science to people in ways that capture the wonder of nature and the excitement that comes from asking questions, tinkering, and figuring things out.
Over time, persistent curiosity and inquiry can provide opportunities for much deeper engagement with science. With that can come confidence that one can figure things out, that phenomena can be understood, that assumptions can be critically examined, and that science is trustworthy.
Broad public engagement in science complements our longstanding commitment to the San Francisco Bay Area’s Science & Technology Museums – including the Exploratorium, UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California Academy of Sciences, and Chabot Space and Science Center. These science-rich educational institutions design exhibits and experiences that invite their visitors to ask and pursue questions and to keep coming back in their quests for understanding. At their best, these halls make science irresistible.
And to nurture promising scientists and inventors, and in tribute to our visionary founder, Gordon Moore, we created the Moore Inventor Fellows. The Moore Inventor Fellowship supports scientist-inventors who create new tools and technologies with a high potential to accelerate progress in the foundation’s areas of interest: scientific discovery, environmental conservation and patient care.
“We cannot know in advance that an invention we support will change the world,” said Robert Kirshner, Ph.D., chief program officer for science at the foundation, “but giving passionate inventors the resources to develop a good idea can accelerate progress in the areas we care about.”
The foundation is allocating a total of nearly $34 million through 2026 to support 50 Moore Inventor Fellows. With the creation of the fellowship, we hope to encourage breakthroughs that accelerate progress for the next 50 years.
When combined, these projects and partnerships create what could be described as an incubator for the care and protection of the public’s curiosity, engagement with science, and invention.
Scientific instrumentation
The foundation’s support for advanced-imaging instruments illustrates the catalytic effect of investment in high-risk areas. Our willingness to make early-stage investments in unproven scientific technologies lowers barriers for institutions to collaborate and increases the rate of discovery and development of new instruments.
In 2012 the foundation’s Science Advisory Board recommended three parallel technical innovation strategies for imaging molecules: the Quantum Electron Microscope, the Superlens Microscope and the Advanced Imaging Center – a collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We adopted a parallel approach because each path was both promising and problematic, and pursuing all in parallel could reduce the time to success and lower the risk of choosing one that did not work.
One of these strategies included the support for development of a quantum electron microscope. The resolution of such a microscope has rapidly advanced since its invention in 1931. State-of-the-art electron microscopes can image single atoms, but they still have a major drawback for biological applications. The powerful electron beam destroys any biological samples that are not embedded in plastic or frozen, preventing the imaging of molecular interactions and dynamics.
The concept behind the quantum electron microscope is to use quantum mechanics to control electrons in such a way that they do not destroy biological molecules in their native state. From its inception, the project was high in scientific risk because of the complexity of the physics, the early stage of the field, the lack of a clear theoretical framework, and the need for nanometer components that had never been designed or built before.
After nine years the goal to develop a fully damage free electron microscope has yet to be realized, but through experimentation, perseverance and creativity, the project team has developed a quantum optical microscope. Based on a novel quantum protocol called multi-pass microscopy, this modification reduces sample damage by 10 to 50-fold, a remarkable achievement. A multi-pass quantum electron microscope is currently being constructed and will be tested in 2022. If it performs as expected it will have a significant impact on the imaging field. This work also shows how creative scientists change course when their original idea hits an impediment.
The strategy to provide grants to several research groups to take a distinct but complementary approach to the problem, ultimately, helps move the field closer to creating a microscope that can peer through atoms and molecules without disturbing them.
Cleaning supply chains
In 2015, the foundation launched a trio of strategies in its Environmental Conservation Program to harness market forces to achieve conservation outcomes. With a focus on forests and agriculture, oceans and seafood, and finance, the work aims to reduce the environmental footprint of these commodities’ production and harvest practices. By enhancing support and demand for food production practices that do not degrade intact ecosystems, this work complements the foundation’s historical place-based approach to conserving ecosystems of global significance.
In the first phase of this $221.8 million initiative, foundation grantees and other partners collectively helped change purchasing practices of major buyers, set and strengthen standards for production and sourcing, and shift production toward more eco-friendly practices on the ground.
“The need to produce food without causing severe environmental degradation,” said Aileen Lee, chief program officer for the foundation’s Environmental Conservation Program, “is essential to maintaining the productive capacity and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystems.”
Grantees have worked with companies to improve sourcing for cattle, soy, and top-traded seafood, and they have produced key data and science-based tools to enable better public and private actor choices. The work ensures that companies improve the performance of their suppliers—rather than simply switching to “cleaner” suppliers elsewhere. As a result, and through sector-wide agreements rather than individual action, commodity production systems are improving in regions identified as having some of the greatest conservation need.
Extending early progress, the foundation has committed an additional $173 million in grantmaking for its Conservation and Markets Initiative. That funding supports continued work toward a particular goal: For a critical mass of market actors responsible for the production, sourcing, and financing of the highest-forest-risk commodities and top-traded seafood to delink their operations and investments from ecosystem degradation.
“Through collective action,” said Sabine Miltner, Conservation and Markets Initiative program director, “we have seen that business practices are changing and can further improve among a critical mass of companies.”
By focusing on companies that operate internationally, the work can deliver results within a company’s broad supply system and across industries’ global reach—helping to safeguard intact ecosystems of global significance.
History of the
Marine Microbiology Initiative
000,000,000
This is a fairly long deck that is a good, quick summary of the content below
uiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as et ant atiae verum laciet labor modia pos quidus, optaturesto blant.Eque opti ut quam volore reperiat.Ecae velenit, consero rpore, ius as maiore, corempos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas
“Quote from one of the participants in this inititiave. that is compelling and forward thinking”-
Name Here
Title
assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis.
annual report
The foundation’s ability to take risks and make long-term and relatively large commitments should allow it to undertake challenges not accessible to many other organizations.
Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.
Measurement, evaluation and learning are part of our DNA. From the start, we have been outcomes-driven, and through the years, we’ve relied on rigorous inquiry and adaptive management to guide our work. The scope of the challenges we prioritize guarantee that results are never certain and that conditions are constantly and unpredictably changing. Comprehensive investigations, well-vetted theories of change, and honest evaluation of our impact help us make informed decisions and reveal lessons from our successes and failures.
Gordon and Betty Moore “believe that science and the type of rigorous inquiry that guides science are keys to achieving the outcomes we want. Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.”
Upholding our founders’ values and beliefs, we practice adaptive management a systematic method for project management. It integrates design, management, monitoring and evaluation to provide a framework for testing assumptions, adaptation and learning. We believe that when those closest to the work, including our own staff and grantees, use adaptive management, they can improve effectiveness and impact. Institutional curiosity, innovation and a willingness to be open to change and failure are necessary skills for this approach.
The Four Filters
To evaluate possible ideas, programmatic activities and any significant potential endeavors, we consistently ask four questions:
1. Is it important? Successfully addressing the issue will result in large positive benefit or avoidance of substantial negative consequences.
2. Can we make an enduring difference? Significant enduring impact can be achieved that would not be achieved without Foundation support.
3. Is it measurable? To track progress and confirm outcomes, measurement against goals is necessary. It is often difficult to implement, but key to our quantitative approach to philanthropy.
4. Does it contribute to a portfolio effect? Synergy can increase impact and a portfolio can decrease risks.
Investigate
Through standalone grantmaking and formal investigations, the foundation explores potential areas of opportunity to determine if and how the foundation can make an enduring difference.
By staying well-informed in our areas of focus and making decisions on the basis of knowledge, analysis, external input and objective due diligence, our program teams cultivate a pipeline of ideas that can be accelerated if funding is available.
Measure and evaluate
The Four Filters question, “Is it measurable?” is core to every funding decision we make. Given the complexity of problems we aim to tackle, we often embark on work knowing we will need to expect a time horizon of decades, rather than years, to achieve the outcomes we seek.
Early in the foundation’s history, former President Ed Pehoet, Ph.D. emphasized, ‘’each program that we fund should have a set of measurable outcomes within a decade – and I think it’s a good time frame to think about. Shorter than a decade-off is too short. Longer than a decade becomes too abstract. . . I think if you can’t measure something in 10 years probably it means it may be too big a problem or the measurements just aren’t there.”
Monitor and adapt
Defining those long-term outcomes doesn’t mean we wait a decade to measure progress. Instead, we look for intermediate results that signal whether we are on track to what we hope to achieve, and we invest in research to better understand whether our theories of change hold. In both instances, our findings may help to validate our strategic plans or alert us to the need to adapt our strategies to changing knowledge or circumstance.
For example, nearly eight years into our XX-year, $XXX million Wild Salmon Ecosystem Initiative, we funded a scientific analysis of the relationships between salmon diversity, habitat and ecology. That research affirmed that the abundance and diversity of wild salmon were not put at risk by salmon management practices reinforcing the critical importance of the strategy.
Exit responsibly
Measurement and evaluation also help us to assess when our investment in a given area may have a diminishing return. Our long-term initiatives are built upon comprehensive plans that theorize how our funding across multiple strategies will lead toward the ultimate outcome we seek. When we launched the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative in 2013, our aim was to research through support of data-driven scientists and their innovative approaches.
The initiative was responsive to research and analysis that showed a significant gap in public and private funding for data science efforts focused on the natural sciences. By investing in this area at an early stage, we helped researchers apply data science to their work and generated broader use of data science in the natural sciences across the country.
Five years into the initiative, a comprehensive external evaluation and assessment by an external expert panel in 2018 revealed that the landscape of funding for data science had shifted significantly during the course of the initiative. Those findings led us to reevaluate our funding approach. We shifted funding to solidify the gains of the initiative and boost the development and use of data science tools for the natural sciences, with the intent to close the initiative in 2021.
When they created the foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore understood the unique role it could play in our areas of focus. In their Statement of Founders’ Intent, they underscored that the foundation’s ability to “take risks and make long-term and relatively large commitments should allow it to undertake challenges not accessible to many other organizations.”
With early-stage funding and collaboration among unlikely allies, we have been able to catalyze invention, new scientific instruments, large-scale conservation, and cleaner commodity supply chains. At times, early funding gives grantees the time and space to prove their ideas to other funders
Enabling invention and inspiring scientific engagement
Curiosity is a hallmark of science. The foundation works to stoke that curiosity about the natural world at all ages. Enhanced opportunities for active engagement with science cultivates an inquisitive and open-minded public that appreciates, values and uses science. We seek to bring science to people in ways that capture the wonder of nature and the excitement that comes from asking questions, tinkering, and figuring things out.
Over time, persistent curiosity and inquiry can provide opportunities for much deeper engagement with science. With that can come confidence that one can figure things out, that phenomena can be understood, that assumptions can be critically examined, and that science is trustworthy.
Broad public engagement in science complements our longstanding commitment to the San Francisco Bay Area’s Science & Technology Museums – including the Exploratorium, UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California Academy of Science, and Chabot Space and Science Center. These science-rich educational institutions design exhibits and experiences that invite their visitors to ask and pursue questions and to keep coming back in their quests for understanding. At their best, these halls make science irresistible.
And to nurture promising scientists and inventors, and in tribute to our visionary founder, Gordon Moore, we created the Moore Inventor Fellows. The Moore Inventor Fellowship supports scientist-inventors who create new tools and technologies with a high potential to accelerate progress in the foundation’s areas of interest: scientific discovery, environmental conservation and patient care.
“We cannot know in advance that an invention we support will change the world,” said Robert Kirshner, Ph.D., chief program officer for science at the foundation, “but giving passionate inventors the resources to develop a good idea can accelerate progress in the areas we care about.”
The foundation is allocating a total of nearly $34 million through 2026 to support 50 Moore Inventor Fellows. With the creation of the fellowship, we hope to encourage breakthroughs that accelerate progress for the next 50 years.
When combined, these projects and partnerships create what could be described as an incubator for the care and protection of the public’s curiosity, engagement with science, and invention.
Scientific instrumentation
The foundation’s support for advanced-imaging instruments illustrates the catalytic effect of investment in high-risk areas. Our willingness to make early-stage investments in unproven scientific technologies lowers barriers for institutions to collaborate and increases the rate of discovery and development of new instruments.
In 2012 the foundation’s Science Advisory Board recommended three parallel technical innovation strategies for imaging molecules: the Quantum Electron Microscope, the Superlens Microscope and the Advanced Imaging Center – a collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We adopted a parallel approach because each path was both promising and problematic, and pursuing all in parallel could reduce the time to success and lower the risk of choosing one that did not work.
One of these strategies included the support for development of a quantum electron microscope. The resolution of such a microscope has rapidly advanced since its invention in 1931. State-of-the-art electron microscopes can image single atoms, but they still have a major drawback for biological applications. The powerful electron beam destroys any biological samples that are not embedded in plastic or frozen, preventing the imaging of molecular interactions and dynamics.
The concept behind the quantum electron microscope is to use quantum mechanics to control electrons in such a way that they do not destroy biological molecules in their native state. From its inception, the project was high in scientific risk because of the complexity of the physics, the early stage of the field, the lack of a clear theoretical framework, and the need for nanometer components that had never been designed or built before.
After nine years the goal to develop a fully damage free electron microscope has yet to be realized, but through experimentation, perseverance and creativity, the project team has developed a quantum optical microscope. Based on a novel quantum protocol called multi-pass microscopy, this modification reduces sample damage by 10 to 50-fold, a remarkable achievement. A multi-pass quantum electron microscope is currently being constructed and will be tested in 2022. If it performs as expected it will have a significant impact on the imaging field. This work also shows how creative scientists change course when their original idea hits an impediment.
The strategy to provide grants to several research groups to take a distinct but complementary approach to the problem, ultimately, helps move the field closer to creating a microscope that can peer through atoms and molecules without disturbing them.
Cleaning supply chains
In 2015, the foundation launched a trio of strategies in its Environmental Conservation Program to harness market forces to achieve conservation outcomes. With a focus on forests and agriculture, oceans and seafood, and finance, the work aims to reduce the environmental footprint of these commodities’ production and harvest practices. By enhancing support and demand for food production practices that do not degrade intact ecosystems, this work complements the foundation’s historical place-based approach to conserving ecosystems of global significance.
In the first phase of this $221.8 million initiative, foundation grantees and other partners collectively helped change purchasing practices of major buyers, set and strengthen standards for production and sourcing, and shift production toward more eco-friendly practices on the ground.
“The need to produce food without causing severe environmental degradation,” said Aileen Lee, chief program officer for the foundation’s Environmental Conservation Program, “is essential to maintaining the productive capacity and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystems.”
Grantees have worked with companies to improve sourcing for cattle, soy, and top-traded seafood, and they have produced key data and science-based tools to enable better public and private actor choices. The work ensures that companies improve the performance of their suppliers—rather than simply switching to “cleaner” suppliers elsewhere. As a result, and through sector-wide agreements rather than individual action, commodity production systems are improving in regions identified as having some of the greatest conservation need.
Extending early progress, the foundation has committed an additional $173 million in grantmaking for its Conservation and Markets Initiative. That funding supports continued work toward a particular goal: For a critical mass of market actors responsible for the production, sourcing, and financing of the highest-forest-risk commodities and top-traded seafood to delink their operations and investments from ecosystem degradation.
“Through collective action,” said Sabine Miltner, Conservation and Markets Initiative program director, “we have seen that business practices are changing and can further improve among a critical mass of companies.”
By focusing on companies that operate internationally, the work can deliver results within a company’s broad supply system and across industries’ global reach—helping to safeguard intact ecosystems of global significance.
History of the
Marine Microbiology Initiative
000,000,000
This is a fairly long deck that is a good, quick summary of the content below
uiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as et ant atiae verum laciet labor modia pos quidus, optaturesto blant.Eque opti ut quam volore reperiat.Ecae velenit, consero rpore, ius as maiore, corempos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas
“Quote from one of the participants in this inititiave. that is compelling and forward thinking”-
Name Here
Title
assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis.