Sam Weiss Evans is a Senior Policy Advisor for the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, where he leads the Commission’s work on biosecurity, biosafety, and responsible innovation.
Prior to joining NSCEB, Sam was a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University, jointly with the Kennedy School of Government’s Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS), the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Data Science Initiative.
He has spent the past twenty years studying and building experimental governance capacity in bioengineering and several other areas of emerging technology. His experiments ran the gamut of the research and innovation life cycle, as well as the scale from personal to international levels of governing. Early-stage training of scientists and engineers included redesigning the undergraduate engineering curriculum at Harvard and helping lead the Human Practices Committee with the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition. Experiments in funding included advising DARPA on its Safe Genes Program and helping to run the Policy and Practices component of the National Science Foundation’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Synberc). Experiments in national governance (besides his work on the NSCEB) include being on the Council of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium and having worked closely with the Department of Commerce’s Emerging Technology Technical Advisory Committee on matters related to export controls.
Sam’s academic background includes a focus on science and technology studies (STS), critical security studies, and organizational analysis. He holds a B.A. in Physics and Philosophy from St. Olaf College and a M.S. in Management Research from Oxford University. His D.Phil., also from Oxford, was a study of the dual use list modification processes of the Wassenaar Arrangement, a multilateral export control regime for conventional arms and dual use goods and technologies. He has also held positions in the STS Programs at the University of California, Berkeley and Tufts University. He maintains a Research Affiliate positions with the Program on Emerging Technology at MIT.
He is speaking at this event in his personal capacity.
