I Am Not a Good Fit: Reflections on My Journey with EA and Global Priorities
I have hesitated for some time before writing this, but I feel it is worth sharing. Perhaps others have felt this way too.
Looking at EA priorities and opportunities, I have come to realize I am not a good fit for any EA funding opportunity, and getting help has been particularly difficult.
I am a faculty member at the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University. I did not train in the US but in Nigeria, and this usually comes with its limitations. However, I have always tried to make efforts to grow and improve so I can make impact in my little way.
Part of this effort was my attempt to pivot my research. I started off working on fungi—asking the question of how fungi are responding to climate change. But when I couldn’t get funding to generate even basic data, I decided to pivot to phages.
Someone may ask: there are funders everywhere, why not apply? Yes, there are, but it feels different being a Nigerian applying for funding for basic science. Most grants require preliminary data, which I cannot generate without funding. International collaborators are not difficult to find—but many of them want arrangements where I send samples, and they do the sequencing and analysis abroad. This model keeps us dependent and leaves little room for building real capacity here.
My interest in phages comes from believing they can make real impact here. In my little way, I have tried. I co-founded the Africa Phage Forum. I also led the establishment of the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics (CENPBAT), a non-profit in Jos, Plateau State, which houses Nigeria’s first phage bank and by extension, West Africa’s. This was made possible through seed funding from Emergent Ventures. The phage bank is still struggling—basic things like electricity make it hard—but we do have a collection of phages.
I also believe phages can help solve some of Nigeria’s common problems, like the overuse of antibiotics in aquaculture, and possibly as vaccines. To build my capacity in this area, I applied to EA Funds for career development and also to Open Philanthropy, but both applications were turned down. Talking directly with funders has not been as easy as it might seem either.
At times, I also wonder what exactly biosecurity means, and what makes someone a “good fit” in biosecurity or global catastrophic risk. I have made proposals and attempted to start conversations on studying wastewater and hospital environments for novel pathogens. But the response I often get is, “this is not our priority at this time.”
At the moment, CENPBAT has begun exploring vaccines—using phages to design vaccines for common local diseases like Typhoid. Again, the response from potential partners or funders is often that “this is not our concern or priority right now.”
After years of trying, applying, and hoping, I have reached a hard conclusion: I do not feel like a good fit for the EA community, and perhaps I need to look elsewhere for a place where I fit better.
I share this not as a complaint, but as an honest reflection. If others have struggled with similar feelings of not fitting into EA opportunities, I would be glad to hear your thoughts and advice
If you would like to talk, feel free to reach out to me via email: eennadi@plasu.edu.ng
Hey Emmannaemeka,
Thank you for writing this! I have little insight as to which EA roles you might or might not be a good fit for. But I wanted to chime in on ways of fitting into the EA community, as opposed to EA orgs. I am in academia, too, and do not myself strive to get a job with an EA org. I do not think this makes me ‘less EA’. There are many really good ways to contribute to the overall EA project that are not at EA organizations.
I find one of the privileges that come with academia is teaching ambitious, talented students. Many students enter university with a burning zeal to change the world and bring about positive change. I think as teachers, we can have a real impact by guiding such students towards realizing their values and going into positions where they can effectively make the world a better place. I am naturally biased in my assessment of this, but I think its plausible that teaching can have a bigger impact than direct work—it is a realistic aim to get multiple students that you can help grow into direct roles in EA-style organizations. I often think that many of these students are ‘better fits’ than I myself would be in such roles.
It strikes me that as a faculty member in a genuinely meaningful and important field, you’d be in a premier position to have impact through your teaching.
Thank you so much for this kind and insightful message. I really resonate with what you’ve said. Like you, I see academia not just as a career but as a platform to shape future leaders. Many of our students come in with raw passion but little direction, and I believe one of the most meaningful things we can do is help channel that energy into impactful work. Your point that teaching can sometimes rival or even surpass direct EA roles in terms of influence is encouraging. It reframes the classroom as a multiplier of impact, which I find deeply motivating.
That said, one of the challenges in my context is that education in Nigeria is often weighed down by inadequate infrastructure and limited access to modern research tools. This makes it harder to fully unlock the potential of bright students who could otherwise thrive in global science and problem-solving spaces. Still, I believe even within these constraints, there is room to inspire, mentor, and connect students to broader opportunities. This is where I hope to make my strongest contribution within EA and beyond
Hi Emmannaemeka, Thanks for writing this, and sorry to hear that has been your experience so far. I don’t work in anything related to biology so I don’t think I can offer any solutions, unfortunately. The only thing that comes to mind, other than bio security, is that fermentation is one area that could be useful to produce alternative proteins. Perhaps the Good Food Institute could be a good place to look into. In any case, I think the EA community should be welcoming to everyone, even if there are no good ways to contribute to most typical EA causes. Again, thanks for writing this.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I agree that pivoting can be useful, but I also believe that what we’re building at the Center for Phage Biology and Therapeutics has a unique and powerful kind of impact.
I often imagine the scenario of a patient who has run out of antibiotic options and is at the brink of death. In that moment, the clinician, or even the patient’s family, reaches out to us, sends us the bacterial isolate, and within days we are able to identify a matching phage, purify it, and return it for therapeutic use. That is not theoretical impact, it is direct, life-saving intervention.
Beyond that, we are currently working on evaluating our phage-based vaccines. If we succeed, we will have built the capacity to rapidly design vaccines against a wide range of infections. This could mean moving from treating individual patients to preventing outbreaks entirely. To me, that is another dimension of impact that one can achieve within a career.
So while I understand the argument that funding availability can influence career trajectories, I think the deeper question is: should external funding constraints dictate what problems we dedicate our lives to solving? For me, the vision of saving lives through phage therapy and building a platform for rapid vaccine development is too important to abandon, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into current funding prioritie
This seems awesome. I’m grateful you are working on this.
Hi Emmannaemeka, thanks for sharing this so honestly. I can see how it would feel discouraging not to find a clear fit within EA’s main cause areas. Still, I think your reflections are really valuable because they highlight that the community benefits from a variety of perspectives, even when they don’t align perfectly with the “typical” paths. It’s also a good reminder that EA should be a welcoming space for exploration, not just specific career tracks. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your journey.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share this thoughtful comment. I really appreciate the encouragement and the reminder that the EA community values a diversity of perspectives and experiences. It means a lot to know that even if my path doesn’t perfectly align with the main cause areas, there is still space to contribute meaningfully.
Your words have given me a fresh sense of reassurance and motivation to keep exploring and engaging. I know there’s still so much for me to learn, and I look forward to growing through these conversations and from the experiences of others in the community.
I know little of microbiology, but I know there is some focus on mirror bacteria. One possible pivot that could attract funding would be to look if phages can be made to track and consume mirror bacteria. This is a super speculative idea, but I think there might be some funding for defenses against mirror life. Perhaps you have already looked at the detailed report on mirror life published at the end of last year (my non-expert read was that it was believed phages would not work—but maybe it is possible to make “mirror phages” in a defense-favoring way)?
Thank you for sharing this—it’s a fascinating idea. I haven’t read the detailed report you mentioned, but I’ve followed some of the broader discussions around mirror life. You’re right that conventional phages wouldn’t work against mirror bacteria because of the chirality mismatch. In theory, only “mirror phages” built from mirror-biological components could infect them.
The idea of mirror phages is interesting because, if mirror organisms were ever discovered or engineered, they might be immune to all our natural defenses and medical tools. In that context, mirror phages could represent one of the very few biological defenses available. Exploring that possibility would also stretch our understanding of what life could look like beyond Earth, which is scientifically exciting.
My concern, however, is twofold. First, the technical barrier is enormous—we don’t currently have the capacity to build entire mirror-biological systems. Second, and more importantly, creating self-replicating mirror entities—whether bacteria or phages—would carry profound risks. Once released, they would operate on completely different biochemistry, outside the checks and balances of our ecosystems. We could neither predict nor easily contain their behavior, because no existing biological process in our world could break them down. That means even if they posed no direct harm to us, they could persist indefinitely, occupying niches, competing for resources, or interacting with the environment in ways we cannot anticipate.
Another layer of complexity is that phages are natural genetic transducers—they move genes between organisms. If mirror phages were ever created, we cannot be certain how they might interact with ordinary bacteria. While direct gene transfer across chiral systems seems unlikely, biology has a way of surprising us, and even small, indirect interactions could have unforeseen consequences. This uncertainty makes their study both intriguing and potentially risky.
So while the concept of mirror phages is highly speculative, it is also deeply double-edged: they could be our only defense against mirror pathogens, but they also raise the possibility of introducing a form of life that sits entirely beyond our current safety frame
Hi Nnaemeka, yeah I totally agree about not doing something potentially advancing the creation of dangerous mirror organisms. I am commenting just to iterate what I said about “defense-favoring”—I know little of microbiology but thought I would mention just in case there might be some way to very lightly modify an existing non-mirror phage to “hunt and kill” mirror microbes (e.g. just altering their “tracking” and “ingestion” system). But this is probably an incredibly naive idea but thought I would put it out there as there is a whole chapter on phages in the mirror bio report. Also, my impression from the report is that there is scientific uncertainty about how bad mirror bio would be. It might be worth solidifying this by e.g. taking single parts of plant or human immune systems and exposing them only to simple, single mirror molecules that would likely be present on mirror organisms. This might show definitely that mirror bio might be catastrophic. But I would do any such work in really tight cooperation with the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund and others and definitely not act unilaterally. It might at least be worth it to read at least the most relevant parts of the mirror bio report if you might have time.
How do you go about the “pitch”? That is, how do you try to convince EA grantmakers to give you funding? EAs tend to be interested in the most effective interventions, or at least “hits-based” interventions (ideas that have high expected value after multiplying by a low probability of success).
Now, funders should maybe also be interested in community-building funding, where a grant is given not so much because a project is likely to make an outsized difference in the world, but simply because an EA (GWWC signatory?) wants to use their expertise to do good in a specific way, and they have been unable to get funding to do so through conventional channels, without there being an apparent good reason for that (i.e. the project seems worthwhile and deserving). I don’t know if there’s a standard way of thinking about this question, but I’ve had some rejections from EA orgs myself, and I suspect it’s easy for EA orgs to undervalue the EA community itself.
And of course, when it comes to African EAs in Africa, cost-effectiveness might be doubled or tripled by the low cost of living, and there is additional value to the local economy in keeping educated people in Africa rather than encouraging them to move somewhere with more grants.
Thanks for this thoughtful response.
Your framing of the “pitch” really resonates with me. I’ve also come to see that EA funders are usually looking for two things: either a very clear expected-value calculation (large-scale upside even if low probability), or a hits-based angle that justifies the risk. In my own applications, I have tried to emphasize both the problem framing (AMR, vaccine access, neglected pathogens) and the counterfactuals (what happens if no one funds work like this in West Africa).
Where I sometimes struggle is that the models of impact that are easiest to pitch are not always the ones that are easiest to pursue from here. For example, data generation without lab infrastructure is a huge bottleneck, and “outsourcing” samples to labs abroad doesn’t build the kind of capacity that would make Africa a real hub for cost-effective interventions in the future. So my pitch often ends up highlighting not just the potential impact of the science, but also the long-term community and capacity-building effects.
I agree with you that EA orgs may undervalue this community dimension. A grant that enables African researchers to stay in Africa and work on global health challenges doesn’t just have immediate outputs—it creates future multipliers by training students, sustaining institutions, and making EA more global in practice rather than just in aspiration.
And your point about cost-effectiveness is key. The “multiplier effect” of lower cost of living and local economic benefit is rarely factored into evaluations, yet it can make projects here 2–3x more efficient than equivalents in high-income countries.
I’d be curious—when you’ve pitched community-building or capacity-building angles, have you found particular ways of framing them that land better with funders?
Thanks for your answer; it sounds like you basically understand the game the same way I do. Unfortunately, I can’t offer useful advice, because I’m an Earning-To-Give engineer with no experience in science work, grantmaking or grant-receiving. (There’s a project I’d like funding for, but haven’t worked hard on pitches because I’m contractually “locked in” to my current job.)
Thanks for sharing this, it’s not easy to be so open, but I’m sure many people can relate to what you’re feeling. What you’ve done with the Africa Phage Forum and CENPBAT already sounds like a big step forward, even if support has been hard to find.
Have you come across any smaller funders or networks (maybe outside EA) that are more open to capacity-building projects in Nigeria/West Africa? Sometimes it feels like the challenge is less about the idea and more about finding people who really get the context.
Thank you for this kind and encouraging message. You’re right—it’s not always easy to share openly. To be honest, I don’t know how a lot of people will perceive me after now. But I felt it was important to speak from where I stand. Sometimes it seems that EA defines “doing good” in a particular way, and that can make it hard to see where other forms of impact fit in.
I’ve participated in some EA mentoring programs, and I found them valuable. At the same time, they often feel like they are preparing people for a job. But what happens in the event that you already have a form of impactful job, yet your impact is limited due to some structural or resource constraints? I wonder what mentorship would look like if it focused more on helping people overcome those constraints that limit their impact, especially in contexts like mine.
On the funding side, I agree with you—smaller funders are very difficult to find. That said, the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics was able to get started with initial support from Emergent Ventures and ACX grants, and that gave us some momentum. Still, building biomedical research capacity here is extremely difficult—both in terms of infrastructure and sustainable funding. Sometimes the issue isn’t the strength of the idea, but rather finding people who really understand the Nigerian and West African context and are willing to invest in it.
Even with the hurdles, I remain committed to pushing forward, and conversations like this give me hope that there’s value in sharing the journey openly.