Biosecurity Career Transition

[BRISHO63]

Hi everyone. I'm strongly considering transitioning into the biosecurity field and want to hear from other engineers looking to do the same or who have already done it.

• What inspired you to consider working in this area?

• What resources have you found to be most helpful?

• Have you done any cool projects either on your own, at school or work, etc?

So far, I've been listening to 80k hours podcasts and going through the Blue Dot Impact syllabus for their biosecurity course. I also have listened to some of the engineered for impact interviews on youtube.

I've also been thinking about how I can do some sort of experiment at home to get a better sense of what I might enjoy doing. Maybe something like air flow modeling to see how different types of pathogens and things that may help kill those pathogens (glycol, UV) move through a room with or without fans/forced air.

Let me know what you all are doing or thinking about!

[gavinscode]

I'm an engineer working in biosecurity, but I had already moved over to neuroscience and biophysics research before finding out about effective altruism and starting with biosecurity.

I think conversations and informational interviews with other engineers working in biosecurity would be most helpful. If you can find somebody who can give you a small task to work on for their project, I think that would be more useful than doing a work test by yourself, both in terms of picking something relevant to work on, and also for getting a feeling about working with people in biosecurity (i.e. what's important to them vs. your current industry)

Coefficient Giving has career development funding that would be good to support an extended work test: https://coefficientgiving.org/funds/global-catastrophic-risks-opportunities/career-development-and-transition-funding/

[BRISHO63]

Thanks, that's great advice.

Curious what your day-to-day looks like and what specifically you're working on if you don't mind discussing.