Expand a handful of existing case studies into 25–40 profiles of legitimate and concerning customers, including historical cases of people who ordered dangerous biological material.
Status: Likely to be picked up by IBBIS/EBRC in 2026. Contact them before starting; there may still be room to help.
Dual-use risk. Some biosecurity work can be misused. Work with an experienced mentor, keep anything you publish high-level, and ask before sharing detailed material.
Training screening teams, grounding policy discussions and sharpening screening rules all need realistic examples.
Output: A structured case-study dataset.
Write your question in one sentence.
Spend 30 minutes finding what has already been written about it.
Collect evidence in a simple table: claim, source, how strong.
Draft 1–2 pages: answer first, then reasons, then uncertainties.
Ask one person to poke holes in it, revise, and share.
All steps done
Share what you made, then try another project. The PDF version has room for notes.
Compare “know your customer” and other frameworks for making DNA ordering more secure, drawing on what finance and other industries already do.
Companies make synthetic DNA to order. Screening those orders and the customers who place them is one of the main defences against engineered pandemics. Explain how it works and where the gaps are.
Given a researcher’s ORCID ID, return the organisms they have published on, so a DNA synthesis company can quickly check whether a flagged order fits the customer’s research history.
