“Researcher with a Master of Science with a focus on biosecurity and emergency response strategies for disasters outside our current scope of imagination. Over six years of experience working alongside researchers, professors and industry experts conducting original research on biosecurity, science diplomacy, and global health. Strategic and logical thinker with advanced critical inquiry skills and unique cross-disciplinary expertise in policy and the life sciences.”
As humanity expands its scope of space activities, backward contamination of the Earth’s biosphere is an inevitable consequence with predictable impacts. This project studies the intersection of biosecurity, extraterrestrial biology, policy, and public health, working to preemptively address the unavoidable need for policy and technology solutions to meet the unique biological, chemical, and radiological threats posed by return spacecraft and extraterrestrial materials. My research aims to develop creative policy solutions and novel biosafety and biosecurity infrastructure that will address disaster scenarios beyond our current scope of imaginability.
For my graduate thesis at Georgetown University, I studied international COVID-19 pandemic policy and response strategies, focusing on the importance of a strong national security state to successful vaccine research and development. Drawing on my cross-disciplinary background researching emerging infectious diseases and government power structures, I analyzed nations’ COVID-19 pandemic response through both a biomedical and political lens. My resulting work investigates the intersection between the defense science capabilities required for successful pandemic response and medical counter measure development, and how Great Powers nations wield scientific strength for nation-branding and geopolitical leveraging.
I conducted original and archival research studying Biological Weapons Convention diplomatic agreements and negotiations, post-BWC bioweapons program development, and the movement from perceived 20th-century global health collaboration to COVID-19 pandemic competition. The scope of my work covers Great Power’s historic and contemporary diplomatic use of both non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccine science. My research uniquely tracks Cold War era biological weapons program infrastructure from the post-war period to COVID-19 vaccine research, showing the necessity of legacy defense science infrastructure and long-term security investment to successful vaccine development and manufacturing.
As a member of a group studying planetary protection, our presentation “Biothreats, Biorisks, and Catastrophes in Nuclear Emergency Management: The Dangers of Return Spacecraft and Off-World Biological Materials” covered the complexities of off-world biological contaminants associated with return spacecraft could outpace the United States federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial (FSLTT) emergency response capabilities when facing a threat at the intersection between biological and radiological catastrophes.
As a member of the FSLTT subsection I researched FSLTT-level emergency response frameworks for planetary protection with Madeleine Hesselgesser, using the Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster as a case study for responding to large-scale earth-return catastrophes and interrogating the cultural biosafety gaps in space policy and emergency response. We presented our work at the 6th annual Schull Institute Nuclear Security Summit.
As a member of The Vannevar Group’s Discover AI policy initiative, I studied the impact of social media platforms’ AI algorithms on tweens, supporting evidence-based policy interventions to protect youth from harmful content and advertising. I led the Discover AI team in designing and conducting an experiment mimicking the social media behaviors of male and female 14-year-olds, gathering data on the content Instagram shows minors and observing how that content changes under controlled and layered “engagement” behaviors. Additionally, I took the lead on researching for and creating the Discover AI leave-behind for TVG’s Spring 2024 policy push.
Working for Dr. Johanna Folland during her Ph.D. fellowship at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, I assisted her research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and Eastern Bloc socialist healthcare. Additionally, I conducted independent original research comparing private and nationalized healthcare structures and nations’ associated HIV/AIDS epidemic outcomes.