funding - Donating money to scientific research after my death

I'm lucky - I probably won't have to provide for any loved ones after I die (they can take care of themselves). That means I can use my assets on whatever I want, and most likely, that will be science. The exact amount I can spare depends on how much longer I have to live, but an order of magnitude estimate is $10 million.

I understand that most funding requires proposals from the scientists, which are then peer reviewed. I'm not particularly interested in that. Instead I'm thinking of finding people working on what I'm most interested in (cosmology) and funding them to do whatever they want, trusting in their integrity to use the funds appropriately.

Questions:

1. Is it better to use the funds as a one-shot lump sum, or make it sustainable (that is, keep the principal, and use only the interest on that for funding)?


2. What is a good amount to provide a single professor? Is it better to provide one researcher with the $10 million, or ten different researchers with $1 million, or some other number?


3. How do I go about this? Can I just ask for the professors' bank account numbers, and write in my will to transfer $X into that account?


4. I'd like to talk to the professors, preferably face-to-face, to assess their character. Are the professors likely to be willing to talk?

EDIT: Thanks for answers. I'll need to think about it. I'm not keen on funding PhD students since there're already too many graduates and too few permanent positions. I'm also not keen on funding a fellowship because when I wrote my own applications there were so very many fellowships, many of which required their own separate application. I'm hoping to make things easy.

I also want to free some scientists from spending so much of their time writing funding proposals. Endowing a chair is a possibility but that ties the money to a single university, which is again something I need to think about. Hopefully there'll be many more years before I die to sort all these out, and thanks again for answers.

Answer

Funding people instead of projects is in fact a good idea if you are interested in a supporting fundamental research problems to be addressed. There are multiple ways to go about this, and it's a reasonably well established principle, so you might want to search around a bit how other funding organizations and (non-profit) foundations approach this.

1. Lump sum vs. funding from interest is really a choice between aiming at one or two breakthroughs within a period of 5 to 10 years vs. continuously supporting research in a specific field, on a smaller scale, over 50 to 100 years. This relates to the answer of the next questions...


2. Amount to give to a single professor: A strategy for short term funding (using up the capital) would be to fund the establishment of a new research group, i.e., pay the salary of someone early in their career (assistant or associate professor level) plus some funds for research staff (PhD students and post-docs). I would recommend a funding level of $2M (that is what the Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council provides for a period of 5 years) to $5M per professor, depending on how much expensive equipment and materials are needed to do this research. That means you could fund 2 to 5 such groups. After the period of funding at that level, these persons should have achieved sufficient research results to be self-sustainable, though you cannot be sure that they will continue working on the kind of questions you aimed to fund. For long term funding, I would recommend donating the whole sum as a Financial endowment (see Endowed professorships) to one university. If you assume an interest rate of 1 %, it will pay $100k per year, which might be just enough to pay a professor's salary, or, if the university agrees to pay the professor, could be used to fund 1 - 2 PhD students or post-docs working with the professor.


3. How to spend the money: Don't transfer that money to a professor's private account. Professors get research budgets from their universities, and if the funder wants to, the spending restrictions can be extremely flexible while still making sure that the money is only used on research related costs. So you either need to make an agreement with a university for them to administer the money according to the stipulations you agree on, or set up a foundation that administers the money and pays it to universities, who then put it in the research budget of the professors that it's meant to support. For the first option, you may want to contact a university's alumni or financial office, or maybe the dean of a department in the area you'd like to support.


4. Don't plan to select the persons you're funding yourself. First, it's better to fund young researchers, and if you talk to potential candidates while you still can do it, I'd hope that these will be old, or at least senior researchers, by the time the money becomes available. Instead, choose the persons that will do the selection. In the endowment case, that would be the university department that gets the endowment. Make sure that the general research direction and overall functioning of the department fits to your aims, and only select them if you're reasonably confident that they will use the money according to your aims. In the non-profit foundation case, I'd suggest setting up an advisory board with reputable scientists in the field you'd like to fund, and let them run the selection. Keep in mind that the composition of this group (institutions they come from, character, etc.) will be an important factor in who they select for funding. If this is going to operate over a longer time, make sure that there are regulations in place how new persons can enter the advisory board when you won't be there anymore.