The team behind Fourth Eon Biosecurity

His career spans two decades at the intersection of frontier technology, public policy, and global security. Before Fourth Eon, he spent three years in private equity, having previously co-founded and scaled AMPLYFI, a venture-backed AI company working with defense agencies, and earlier led disruptive technology assessment and European energy technology policy at BP. He is a DARPA SWITCH Working Group Advisor, Innovate UK Council Member, Big if True Science Fellow at Renaissance Philanthropy, and Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Science and Policy. Chris holds a BA in History from SUNY New Paltz and an MSc in International & European Politics from the University of Edinburgh.

He’s spent nearly two decades studying how DNA, RNA, and proteins behave and interact. He is also a Contributing Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, supporting the Center’s work to understand and mitigate global biological risks from advanced AI. Gary holds a BS in Physics from San Jose State University and a PhD in Chemistry from University of California Merced.

His earlier research is listed on Google Scholar↗.

Before deciding that teaching rocks to do math was the career he wanted, Dustin worked in the clinical lab at the Children’s hospital in Denver, as well as several different research laboratories working on biofuels and cancer research.

He’s also been to 45 countries and continues to treat that number as insufficient.

He started programming in seventh grade, independently discovered Monte Carlo simulation of population genetics when he needed a tenth-grade biology project the evening before it was due, and may or may not have hacked his high school’s library system as a practical joke. He discovered physics in twelfth grade and never looked back, earning a BS and PhD in Physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dalliances with nuclear theory, chaos theory, complexity theory, and neural networks eventually gave way to physics education research and a tenured faculty position at UNC Greensboro. Increasingly concerned about civilizational collapse and existential threats, Ian looked for a way to contribute his skills to the greater good and found biosecurity. He began working on DNA synthesis screening through the inaugural ERA AIxBio Research Fellowship, continued the work part-time, and ultimately left his faculty position to join Fourth Eon full-time. He remains an Emeritus Associate Professor of Physics at UNC Greensboro.

InvestigatingFast, efficient ways to find protein-coding sequences inside DNA synthesis orders, comparing compression-based methods, biophysically motivated classifiers, and convolutional neural networks.

ERA AIxBio · Winter 2026↗

Previously, she served as Senior Investment & Credit Specialist at the UK’s national innovation agency, was founding CFO of a deep-tech company, and built BNP Paribas’ Commodity Finance Credit Execution team in New York. She mentors early-stage biotechnology companies through UF Innovate. Susan holds a BA in International Commerce & French from University College Dublin and an MA in Philosophies of Asia from SOAS, University of London.

He is a medical doctor and computational biologist with expertise in biosecurity, evolutionary biology, and genotype-phenotype relationships. James holds a BA in Medical Sciences from Oxford University, an MBBS from Imperial College London, and a PhD in Computational Cancer Genomics from University College London.

He is a computational scientist with a background in numerical simulation and scientific computing. As an Apart Research Fellow, he studied the adversarial robustness of genomic foundation models. He is interested in how AI bio models could fail and how biosecurity safeguards can be made robust to those failures. Ajay holds a Dr.-Ing. in Computational Sciences from RWTH Aachen University.

MATS · Autumn 2026↗

He is interested in AI capabilities and biosecurity risk. He has contributed to publications on LLM risks in agriculture and computational methods in ecology. Previously, he worked at McKinsey on geospatial analytics and generative AI for agriculture. He was an ERA AIxBio Research Fellow in the Winter 2026 cohort.

ERA AIxBio · Winter 2026↗

She has research experience in viral genomics and cancer immunology. She first developed her Fourth Eon research as a SPAR research fellow, and now co-mentors a SPAR Fall 2026 project on the same question with Gary Abel.

InvestigatingWhether the learned representations of biological foundation models can identify structurally or functionally related proteins at low sequence identity.

SPAR mentor · Fall 2026↗

He is a synthetic biologist and protein engineer with experience in genetic code expansion, orthogonal translation systems, noncanonical amino acids, and computational analysis of protein function. Previously, he worked in the George Church lab and at Arizona State University on questions spanning engineered translation, protein function, and the origins and evolution of the genetic code. He holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from National University of Singapore.

MATS · Summer 2026↗

Previously, Janika worked on U.S. biosecurity policy at the Institute for Progress, researched antivirals for her medical doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and worked on a pathogen early warning system at MIT. Janika is a licensed physician in Germany and studied medicine in Heidelberg, Oxford, and Berlin.

Previously, John served as a Program Manager across the U.S. Intelligence and Defense community’s premier R&D agencies—DARPA, HSARPA, and IARPA. In these roles, he conceptualized, funded, and executed landmark programs aimed at solving critical national security challenges in biodefense and biosecurity. His background spans strategic advisory and deep scientific research experiences. As an Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, he advised government and industry stakeholders on complex biotechnology portfolios and emerging technical risks. As a Postdoctoral Fellow and Staff Scientist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI-Frederick), he led research on retroviral structure-function relationships and HIV drug resistance mechanisms. John holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from West Virginia University and a B.A. in Chemistry from Vanderbilt University.

As an ERA AIxBio Research Fellow (Summer 2026 cohort), she applied her background in computational structural biology to the risk of catastrophic biological misuse. Alex holds a BSc in Nanostructure Engineering, an MSc in Physical Chemistry, and an MSc in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Warsaw, and is an alumna of the Fulbright BioLAB Program.

ERA AIxBio · Summer 2026↗

At Fourth Eon, Chris investigated biosecurity risks brought by the rapid development of AI tools, particularly at the interface of structural and computational biology, funded by a career transition grant. Chris holds a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London and a MSc by Research in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford.

She is the founder of Omnyra, an AI-native sequence and protocol screening platform built with the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate and the Defense Innovation Unit, and founder of BiofoundryOS, a cross-biofoundry routing layer. Previously, Emi worked as a software engineer at Amazon, consulted for OpenAI and Google DeepMind, and developed cardiovascular modeling tools at Stanford’s Cardiovascular Biomechanics Lab. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Biology from Stanford University.

Beyond this, their biosecurity work includes co-developing an AI Know-Your-Customer tool for DNA providers, scoping a research program for function-based screening of nucleic acid sequences with the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, and AI-bio threat modelling as a GovAI Winter Fellow. They hold a BSc in Biology and Philosophy from the University of St Andrews.