Current biosafety and biosecurity rules often can’t effectively constrain life scientists who don’t want to follow them, and new risks are arising faster than rules can be created. How do we motivate life scientists to proactively monitor the risks of their work without the tool of institutional rules?

In collaboration with colleagues at Stanford , I am conducting surveys and interviews to understand and influence the subjective meanings and attitudes that life scientists hold around biorisk mitigation. The results of this research will inform messaging, training, and onboarding programs to contribute to a culture of responsibility in the life sciences.

If dual-use risk management practices in the life sciences were collected and shared more widely, the field as a whole could learn how to assess risk more effectively and adopt stronger collective norms of risk management. How do we encourage influential stakeholders in the life sciences to adopt and share dual-use risk management practices?

In collaboration with colleagues at Stanford and the Nuclear Threat Initiative's Biosecurity Innovation and Risk Reduction Initiative, I am interviewing key international stakeholders in the life sciences (funders, researchers, and publishers) about their current dual-use risk assessment practices, collecting case-studies of best practices, and documenting barriers to adoption. The results of this research will be published as a collection of publicly-available resources.

Many sectors of the economy need a more security-aware workforce, including the life sciences and IT. One core security practice is the habit of identifying security flaws in the systems around you (sometimes called the "security mindset"). But existing discussions of the security mindset often characterize it as mysterious and unteachable (e.g. Schneier, 2008). How do we promote security mindsets at scale?

In collaboration with colleagues at Stanford and the University of Maastricht, I am interviewing security experts and laypeople about their beliefs and attitudes regarding a range of security topics. I hypothesize that the security mindset can be understood and promoted using concepts and tools from behavioral science. The results of this research will be used to more accurately measure security mindsets in employment settings, and to create educational activities that can promote security mindsets.

US government policy requires that institutions receiving federal funding assess some life-science research for dual-use concerns and recommend mitigation strategies as needed. However, there is little empirical research on how much different reviewers agree or disagree in their assessments. If reviewers cannot agree on risk assessments, or if the choice of mitigation strategies does not heavily depend on risk assessments, then the purpose of assessment becomes less clear. To what extent do independent reviewers agree about the potential dual-use risks of a given research project?

In collaboration with colleagues at Stanford and the iGEM Foundation, I recruited 18 experienced dual-use research reviewers and 49 synthetic biology students to complete a modified version of the US government’s Companion Guide for DURC (dual-use research of concern) Assessment. Participants provided detailed assessments of risks, benefits, and recommended risk management strategies for four real-world synthetic biology projects. Our forthcoming results have implications for dual-use reviewer training and risk management.