AI and biology are expanding what humanity can build faster than our institutions can learn to steer them.
Dept. of DefenseNational AcademiesNSCEB
I work to build the future I want to live in, because it isn’t here yet.
- In Vivo GroupAdvisory on AI and biotech for governments, Fortune 500s, and startups.
- The Connected Ideas ProjectEssays on the technology and the choices around it.
- Translational IntelligenceAn open field guide for building an AI-native biotech.
Safety and speed are not opposites.
The discipline that makes a technology trustworthy is the same one that lets you ship it. AI and biotech are moving faster than the systems meant to govern them, and the reflex is to slow down or look away. Build the responsibility in from the start, the way you would build in security, and you earn the right to move.
We cannot prove an absence of risk, but we can build empirical ways to measure change over time.
This isn’t theoretical.
More than a decade building and governing AI and biotech from inside the institutions that decide what happens to them.
Vigilance Division, Alloy Therapeutics
Chief Executive Officer
Building the division that turns Alloy’s platform into biosecurity countermeasures the country can actually deploy.
National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology
Commissioner, appointed by Congress
Charting the Future of Biotechnology, the national action plan for keeping the country ahead in biotech, delivered to Congress.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Consensus study committee
The Age of AI in the Life Sciences: Benefits and Biosecurity Considerations.
Avidity Biosciences
Vice President, AI & Machine Learning
Built the company’s first enterprise AI organization and put it to work across drug discovery and the business.
U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum
Invited expert testimony
Testimony on measuring the risk of AI in biology instead of guessing.
Colossal Biosciences
Entrepreneur-in-Residence and VP, Strategy & Computational Sciences
Turns out you can change a tiger’s stripes these days.
Google Public Sector
Head of Healthcare & Life Sciences Strategy
Scaled the Intelligent Vaccine Impact solution to more than thirty state and national governments during the COVID-19 response.
U.S. Department of Defense
Inaugural head of biotechnology strategy
Built the Pentagon’s first enterprise biotechnology strategy, the groundwork that launched BioMADE.
Amazon
Research Fellow, Alexa AI
A research fellowship in applied machine learning, understanding the nuance of machine language before Large Language Models (LLMs).
The part I can’t put in a policy paper.
A memo can warn you about a future. A novel puts you inside it. I write speculative fiction about the ethics of the technology I work on: the futures I’m trying to prevent, and a few I’m rooting for.
Echoes of Tomorrow
Monarch
A four-book seriesA system full of responsible people, all making defensible choices, that still turns on the people it was built to protect.
Evil rarely comes with a cackling smile. Sometimes it comes in a spreadsheet.
Away from the desk I go looking for the edge of what I can do, on foot, on a bike, up high. The reasons are the same as the work. Ideas have to survive contact with reality. The limits other people accept are not yours to inherit. You build real capability by walking into uncertainty and finding your way out.
The next ten years of AI and biology will be the most consequential we’ve had. Most of it won’t be settled in a lab.
It comes down to whether the people building the technology and the people writing its rules are ever in the same room. I’ve spent my career trying to be in both. There’s more to do.
For work, speaking, or press, find me on LinkedIn.