🧬 Biosecurity Fellowship | apply by 5 Oct
Applications are open our biosecurity fellowship.
Understand the efforts to prevent, detect and respond to pandemic threats, and work out where you could contribute. Six units, around 30 hours in total, over six weeks.
🗓 When
12 October to 24 November 2026, six sessions.
We set the weekday and the time by survey once places are confirmed, so the sessions land on an evening that works for the whole group.
Applications close Monday 5 October. We decide within ten working days of receiving your application, so applying early means hearing back early. Everyone hears back by 8 October at the latest.
⏱ How it works
Format. Six weeks at around five hours a week.
Each week. Two to three hours of reading and writing on your own, then a two-hour discussion with a small group of peers.
Facilitator. Every discussion is facilitated.
Where. Online, on Google Meet.
Price. Free.
✉️ How to apply
Registering on this page is the application. We read every application and reply to everyone. This page is not a meeting link: session dates are set by survey with the accepted group, and the Google Meet link goes out by email before the first session.
📍 Socials in Zürich
The sessions are online so that people across Switzerland can take part. We also organise socials in Zürich during and after the cohort, and everyone who can get there is invited. For most people who end up working on this, the group matters as much as the material.
📚 What it covers
1. Building a pandemic-proof world. How biological risk has changed, and what a world that could absorb the next outbreak would need.
2. Preventing engineered pandemics. Where AI meets biology, screening of DNA synthesis, and the governance of research that cuts both ways.
3. Detecting early infections. Metagenomic sequencing, biosurveillance, and why detection speed sets the limit for everything after it.
4. Blocking transmission. Protective equipment that works, and making indoor spaces harder for a pathogen to move through.
5. Exiting the pandemic. Vaccines and therapeutics at speed: research, trials, manufacturing, procurement.
6. Contributing to biosecurity. Which open problems match your own skills, which programmes and roles exist, and a one-page plan you write yourself.
No biology background is needed. The curriculum covers the biology it requires as it goes.
👥 Who it is for
Computer scientists and AI researchers. Biological misuse is one of the main routes by which advanced AI could cause large-scale harm, and evaluations, safeguards and synthesis screening are largely engineering problems.
Scientists and domain experts. Depth in synthetic biology, aerosol science, immunology or epidemiology is exactly what building defences requires.
Builders. Many of the countermeasures this field needs currently exist only as drafts in documents.
Policy professionals. Dual-use governance, procurement and the Biological Weapons Convention are unsolved, and they need people who understand the technology well enough to be credible.
Anyone who is very good at something. We expect useful profiles from fields that look nothing like biosecurity.
In practice we expect master's students, doctoral researchers, postdocs and people working in industry, from ETH, UZH, EPFL, Basel and anywhere else in Switzerland. If none of these describes you and the problem does, apply anyway and tell us why.
🚀 What happens after
The last unit exists to make the next step specific rather than vague. After the cohort we offer one-to-one career advising, our paper reading group in Zürich and online, and concrete pointers to international programmes, fellowships and funding.
The curriculum is adapted from the Biosecurity Course developed by BlueDot Impact and is credited to them as the source. This version is run by the Zurich Biosecurity Hub. BlueDot Impact is not involved in running it.
Questions: info@zurichbiosecurity.ch
Website: zurichbiosecurity.ch