East Bay Biosecurity was founded in January 2018 by a group of students and early-career professionals looking for a way to discuss biosecurity issues even when that wasn’t the primary focus of our research and careers.
The group hosted regular events at The Berkeley REACH from 2018-2019. The group was funded by an Center for Effective Altruism Community-Building Grant, which also allowed us to send organizers to biosecurity-related conferences. In 2020, the organizing team took a break to focus on Catalyst Biosummit, and then the COVID-19 pandemic made it unwise to host an in-person meetup group.
Now, a somewhat reconstituted team is restarting the East Bay Biosecurity events in a virtual capacity! If you’re interested in attending, please fill out this form.
Organizers #
Daniel Greene #
Dan is a computational social scientist and a Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he works with Dr. Megan Palmer and Prof. David Relman. He studies the factors driving life scientists' motivation to engage with the risks of their work, using a combination of interviews, surveys, and statistical analysis of historical data provided by the iGEM Foundation. Dan received his PhD in Education from Stanford, where he worked with Prof. Carol Dweck to develop metrics of mindsets that motivate unemployed and underemployed adults to seek out job-skill training. In his spare time, he enjoys meditation and slacklining.
Jeffrey Ladish #
Jeffrey is an information security and biosecurity researcher with a background in evolutionary theory and bat biology. He has a consulting company, Gordian Research, which provides operational security and select biosecurity consulting services. When not thinking about how to improve the long term survival prospects of humanity or practical epistemology, Jeffrey enjoys climbing trees, rocks, buildings, and anything with a clingable surface.
Megan Crawford #
Megan has an Entomology degree and proficiency with data science. Her areas of particular interest include insects, virology, graphs of mortality, and genomics. Previously worked as a scientist at BioAge Labs, a researcher for the cryptocurrency Reserve, and now does independent research and programming.
Tessa Alexanian #
Tessa is a former professional robot whisperer, an aspiring effective altruist, a prior bay area pun-off champion, an amateur biohacker, a former tall ship rigging officer, and chronically overenthused. She works as a Safety & Security Program Officer at the iGEM Foundation, trying to help the student teams in the iGEM competition make nice things with synthetic biology.
Alumni Organizers #
Brian Wang #
Brian is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Sculpting Evolution group at the MIT Media Lab. His research interests include the total synthesis of natural products and the development of synthetic methodologies. He holds a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from UC Berkeley.
Anjali Gopal #
Anjali is a Ph.D. student in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include microfluidics, proteomics, and computational biology. She has a B.A.Sc in Nanotechnology Engineering from the University of Waterloo.