Letās make nice things with biology. Working on nucleic acid synthesis screening at IBBIS. Also into dual-use risk assessment, synthetic biology, lab automation, event production, donating to global health. From Toronto, lived in Paris and Santiago, currently in the SF Bay.
Tessa A šø
Karma: 2,989
Ideas for AI x Bio Hackathon Projects
A small update on each of these project ideas, for the end of 2025:
ORCID-TAXID mapping tool: Alejandro Acelas and Hanna PĆ”lya have created Cliver, which ended up supported by an Astral Codex Ten grant. I believe they are validating with synthesis providers right now; unclear where the project goes long-term, but theyāve made a lot of progress.
Customer Screening Training Dataset: It looks pretty likely that IBBIS and EBRC will work on this project in 2026, building off IBBISās work on customer screening and EBRCās work on end-to-end stress testing
Biosecurity Statements Repository: Shiying and PT Nhean developed one, as announced in this October 2025 EA forum post
Vulnerability Disclosure Framework: Looks like IBBIS will work on this in 2026.
International Suspicious Activity Reporting Analysis: Sentinel Bio funded MITRE in August 2025 to āpropose mechanisms for aggregating data across the nucleic acid synthesis industryā, which feels at least related to this work.
Overall, I must say Iām pretty happy that several of these project ideas ended up getting picked up by volunteers based on the forum post! I should yeet ideas that I donāt have time to work on onto the internet more often.
Thanks for the post! On faruvc.org, you say:
Far-UVC is most valuable in crowded indoor spaces where people spend extended time together. Because it is based on light, it also has the strongest advantages over alternative methods like air purifiers in larger rooms, where beams of light can travel further.
The two lamps you recommend on that site are Aerolamp (500 USD for one lampp) and Nukit Torch (345 USD for 4 smaller lamps). Do you have any sense of:
What kinds of rooms would be better cleaned by the 4 smaller lamps vs. the 1 larger lamp (and whether thatās the most salient difference between Aerolamp and Nukit)?
When it would be better to invest in a Far-UVC lamp vs. a high-CADR air purifier? I think HouseFresh is fairly trusted as a review site ā to be more concrete, who would you recommend buy a CleanAirKits Luggable over a UVC lamp?
I really liked the Rockefeller Gather Guide; the updated Rockefeller Foundation Convening Design Guide version has more on virtual events and is shorter (24 pages), so itās a fine place to start, but the older Gather: The Art and Science of Effective Convening is longer (85 pages) and as a result has more worksheets and activity ideas. I canāt easily find a PDF online for the older version but happy to share over DM.
+1 that the EA Global Bay Area sweatshirt with the bridge is the only EA Global merch I wear with any regularity; itās simply a really nice looking shirt! I wear it more than any other conference /ā company swag, I think.
Iāve seen something similar done with conference badge ribbons, including at fairly stodgy trade shows. The main conference can provide a set of basic ribbons for people to choose from (e.g. roles such as āFirst Time Attendeesā, discussion topics such as āAI governanceā, useful information such as personal pronouns) and then attendees can print and add their own.
Five Tractable BioseĀcuĀrity ProĀjects You Could Start Tomorrow
I canāt speak for the author, and while Iād classify these as examples of suspicion and/āor criticism of EA biosecurity rather than a ābacklash against EAā, here are some links:
Will splashy philanthropy cause the biosecurity field to focus on the wrong risks?, Filippa Lentzos, 2019 (also linked and discussed on the forum)
Exaggerating the risks post series, Reflective Altruism, 2022-2024
Recent criticism specifically of AI-Bio risks, such as Propaganda or Science: Open Source AI and Bioterrorism Risk
Iāll also say Iāve heard criticism of āsecuritising healthā which is much less about EAs in biosecurity and more clashing concerns between groups that prioritise global health and national security, where EA biosecurity folks often end up seen as more aligned with the national security concerns due to prioritising risks from deliberate misuse of biology.
Is That DNA Dangerous
A new biosecurity-relevant newsletter (which me and Anemone put together) is GCBR Organization Updates. Every few months, weāll ask organizations who are doing impactful work to reduce GCBRs to share their current projects, recent publications, and any opportunities for collaboration.
I was part of a youth delegation to the BWC in 2017, and I think the greatest benefit I got was that it raised my aspirations. Iām not sure Iād previously conceived of myself as the sort of person who could speak at the UN. I also heard an expert bowing out of dinner early because they had to go finish their slides for the next day, and realized there isnāt some upper echelon of governance and society where everyone is hypercompetent and on top of things; even at the frigginā United Nations people are making their slides the night before.
I donāt know how much of an effect this had on my decision to start a biosecurity meetup the next year and eventually transition to full-time biosecurity work, but I think it played a role. There are other benefits too; Schelling-point NGO networking, collecting lived-experience stories that make your understanding of diplomacy more vivid, and creating a pressure of prior consistency that increases the chance of that a delegate will continue to work on biosecurity (YMMV on whether the last item is a benefit).
+1 on āspecialist experts are surprisingly accessible to enthusiastic youthā, cf some relevant advice from Alexey Guzey
Thanks for this comment, and thanks to Nadia for writing the post, Iām really happy to see it up on the forum!
Chris and I wrote the guidance for reading groups and early entrants to the field; this was partly because we felt that new folks are most likely to feel stuck/āintimidated/āforced-into-deference/āetc. and because itās where we most often found ourselves repeating the same advice over and over.
I think there are people whose opinions I respect who would disagree with the guidance in a few ways:
We recommend a few kinds of interpersonal interventions, and some people think this is a poor way to manage information hazards, and the community should aim to have much more explicit /ā regimented policies
We recommend quite a bit of caution about information hazards, which more conservative people might consider an attention hazard in and of itself (drawing attention to the fact that information that would enable harm could be generated)
We recommend quite a bit of caution about information hazards, which less conservative people might consider too encouraging of deference or secrecy (e.g. people who have run into more trouble doing successful advocacy or recruiting/āfostering talent, people who have different models of infohazard dyanmics, people who are worried that a lack of transparency worsens the communityās prioritization)
We donāt cover a lot of common scenarios, as Nadia noted in her comment
(Side note: itās always both flattering and confusing to be considered a āsenior memberā of this community. I suppose itās true, because EA is very young, but I have many collaborators and colleagues who have decade(s) of experience working full-time on biorisk reduction, which I most certainly do not.)
This is more a response to āit is easy to build an intuitive case for biohazards not being very important or an existential riskā, rather than your proposals...
My feeling is that it is fairly difficult to make the case that biological hazards present an existential as opposed to catastrophic risk and that this matters for some EA types selecting their career paths, but it doesnāt matter as much in the grand scale of advocacy? The set of philosophical assumptions under which ānot an existential riskā can be rounded to ānot very importantā seems common in the EA community, but extremely uncommon outside of it.
My best guess is that any existential biorisk scenarios probably route through civilisational collapse, and that those large-scale risks are most likely a result of deliberate misuse, rather than accidents. This seems importantly different from AI risk (though I do think you might run into trouble with reckless or careless actors in bio as well).
I think a focus on global catastrophic biological risks already puts oneās focus in a pretty different (and fairly neglected) place from many people working on reducing pandemic risks, and that the benefit of trying to get into the details of whether a specific threat is existential or catastrophic doesnāt really outweigh the costs of potentially generating infohazards.
My guess is that (2) will be fairly hard to achieve, because the sorts of threat models that are sufficiently detailed to be credible to people trying to do hardcore existential-risk-motivated cause prioritization are dubiously cost-benefitted from an infohazard perspective.
Happy to pitch in with a few stories of rejection!
2010: I applied for MIT and Princeton for undergraduate studies and wasnāt accepted to either. Not trying harder to get into those schools was a major regret of mine for about 5 years (I barely studied for the SATs, in part because I was the only person I knew who took themā¦ itās uncommon for Canadians to attend university in the states). I later ended up working on teams with people who had gone to fancy US schools, such that I no longer believe this had a clearly negative impact on my trajectory.
2018: Rejected for LTFF funding for the biosecurity conference that eventually became Catalyst. We re-applied in a subsequent round and were funded.
2018: I applied to be a Research Analyst at Open Phil in their big 2018 recruitment round, and got through two rounds of work tests before ultimately being rejected after an interview. The interview really didnāt go well; I felt like a total idiot, and didnāt get the job. This was maybe the most rough rejection; I felt like I wasted basically all of my non-work time for a month on work tests, at a time when I was feeling pretty bad about how effectively I was spending my time.
2018: rejected from the SynBioBeta conference fellowship run by Johns Hopkins, which at the time felt like it could have been an entry point into a biosecurity career transition. Definitely had some angst about whether it was even possible to make such a transition.
2019: I was rejected from a really cool engineering role at Culture Biosciences after a phone screen interview. I got so distressed after this (āIām not technical enough for a real hardware-y engineering job any more! augh!!ā) that I did some electronics projects that I really didnāt have time for, largely out of angst. They later reached out to me again when they had a role closer to my (more software-specialzied) skillset, and I completed a full round of interviews and received an offer, though I ultimately decided not to leave my job in order to have more time to focus on my part-time biosecurity projects.
These were all pretty painful for me at the timeā¦ and Iām realizing Iāve since come up with stories where the rejections were okay, or part of a fine trajectory. I guess one message here is ājust because you were rejected once doesnāt mean you will be if you apply againā?
Maybe thereās a huge illusion in EA of āsomeone else has probably worked out these big assumptions we are makingā. This goes all the way up to the person at Open Phil thinking āHolden has probably worked these outā but actually no one has.
I just wanted to highlight this in particular; I have heard people at Open Phil say things along the lines of āā¦ but we could be completely wrong about this!ā about large strategic questions. A few examples related to my work:
Is it net positive to have a dedicated community of EAs working on reducing GCBRs, or would it be better for people to be more fully integrated into the broader biosecurity field?
If we want to have this community, should we try to increase its size? How quickly?
Is it good to emphasize concerns about dual-use and information hazards when people are getting started in biosecurity, or does that end up either stymieing them (or worse, inspiring them to produce more harmful ideas)?
These are big questions, and I have spent dozens (though not hundreds) of hours thinking about themā¦ which has led to me feeling like I have āworking hypothesesā in response to each. A working hypothesis is not a robust, confident answer based on well-worked-out assumptions. I could be wrong, but I suspect this is also true in many other areas of community building and cause prioritisation, even āall the way upā.
I recall meeting Karolina M. Sulich, the VP of Osmocosm, at EAGxBerlin last year, and thought some of her machine olfaction x biosecurity ideas were really cool! Iād be stoked for more people to look into this.
A few more you might share:
Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction mailing list
Biological Security (Weekly Updates) from Parlimentarians for Global Action
This is great! I think that project-based learning is simply a way more effective way to learn about a cause area than going through a reading list (I know youāve written about this before). Cold Takes has quite a lot of writing about how just reading stuff is probably not the best way to form a view and robustly retain things.
Itās also super generous of you to offer to review peopleās fit-test projects :)
yeah, we assume this kind of tool would be used as one part of a second-stage follow-up screen when an order has been flagged and canāt be approved by default. I agree that ordering genes from a wide variety of organisms isnāt an anomalous or suspicious signal on its own. Right now, questions like ādoes this person have research history with this organism?ā, which some of signals of legitimacy assembled to decide whether to fulfill a flagged order, are answered by ad-hoc googling by customer service reps; tools like Cliver can automated and accelerate that process (see their recent preprint on Evaluating AI-Assisted Customer Verification for Synthetic Nucleic Acid Screening).