Great questions! The BOINC website has some resources (some of which look pretty old) and if your interest is in medicine, contacting World Community Grid might be a good idea. Someone on here can probably give a better answer to this part, but Gridcoin chooses whitelist projects through a voting process. Projects that make it tend to do involve beneficial research with fairly steady available work units that BOINC users have equal access to.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/boinc.pdf
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ProjectMain#CreatingaBOINCproject
http://www.gridcoin.us/Guides/whitelist.htm