Since most of us are reasonably computer literate and would be likely to consider the possibility of beneficial research, I recommend looking into[ foldingathome.org ]. this is a distributed computing project directed at medical research (cancer and infectious diseases, now including Covid-19). Much like the older SETI@home and Rosetta D.C. programs, it uses several hundred thousand volunteer computers to run number-intensive ‘protein folding’ simulations broken up into small 'work units to be processed and run ‘in the background’ on home or institutional computers. I’m running this in the background on my rig with no discernible effect on streaming or page loading. Check it out, of course. There’s a good overview on Wikipedia about this effort. Interestingly enough, at the recent (Mar. 2020) check, the Multi - exaFLOP total indicates it may be (in combination) the world’s fastest computer.
SETI@Home has wrapped up, but Rosetta is still quite active and cracking away at Covid-19 proteins. It’s on the BOINC platform.
Is there any particular advantage to going with one or the other? I’m assuming (but haven’t looked) that it’s not possible to run both at the same time.