AISI's Chem Bio (CB) team conducts technical research to assess evolving AI capabilities related to science R&D and CB misuse, and the effectiveness of technical safeguards that might mitigate risks arising from those capabilities.
The goal of our research is to inform critical decisions on security, opportunities, policy, and risk mitigation made by governments and AI developers.
We're a close-knit, unusually interdisciplinary team—made up of machine learning researchers and engineers, software engineers, virologists and bacteriologists, behavioural research scientists, biosecurity experts, long-standing CB policy specialists and talented generalists—who work closely with other technical and policy teams across government.
Over the next twelve months CB will hugely scale the range and complexity of the evaluations and research programmes it carries out, and engage more deeply with partners in major AI labs, the wider biotech and pharma ecosystem and security services than it ever has before.
AI capabilities in the life sciences are advancing faster than at any point in history. Foundation models can now design novel proteins and interpret genomic sequences. Specialised biological models can both identify drug targets and design the compound to target them. These are extraordinary tools for scientific progress, but also have the potential for harm if misused.
This role is for a senior technical expert who can bring deep virology and biosecurity judgement to that mission. You will sit directly alongside the CB team’s researchers, helping design and interpret evaluations of how frontier and specialised AI systems perform on biologically relevant tasks, with a particular focus on pathogens and virology-relevant capabilities. You will help translate ambiguous biological risk questions into rigorous empirical evaluations, identify where model outputs are scientifically meaningful versus merely plausible-sounding, and advise on the mitigations, safeguards and evidence standards needed before those results can inform policy. It is a role at the interface of virology, AI evaluation, and biosecurity: shaping what we test, how we test it, and how we explain the significance of our findings to government and external partners.
