2020 Foresight Fellow in Responsible Biotechnology Tessa Alexanian spends her weekdays wrangling robots to accelerate biological engineering and her evenings trying to make sure biologists engineer the right things. She has been organizing biosecurity events in the San Francisco bay area since 2018, first as a founder of East Bay Biosecurity Group and recently as the instigator of the Catalyst collaborative biosecurity summit. She is a member of two of the organizing committees for iGEM, an international synthetic biology competition that brings together thousands of students from dozens of countries each year. The Safety and Security committee reviews risk assessments submitted by iGEM teams, while the Human Practices committee nudges students to consider the broad impacts of their projects through ethical analyses, stakeholder interviews, and other public engagement. Tessa has recently begun volunteering with a team working on privacy-preserving contact tracing for COVID-19.
