How to do an excellent biosecurity project – BlueDot Impact

How to do an excellent biosecurity project

By Will Saunter (Published on June 8, 2024)

The Project Phase in the Pandemics Course is designed to provide you with the opportunity to apply your knowledge and create meaningful contributions to the field of pandemic preparedness. This blog post provides an overview of what to expect during this phase.

Goals

The primary goals of the Project Phase are to:

  • Apply your knowledge: Use the overview of the field you gained during the learning phase and do a deep dive into one practical, real-world application. 
  • Develop a portfolio: Create a tangible output that showcases your skills, knowledge, and contributions to pandemic risk mitigation. This can be used during job applications. 
  • Contribute to the field: Make a meaningful impact by addressing pressing issues in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
  • Build relationships: Strengthen your professional network within the biosecurity community, fostering relationships that support you to find opportunities and advance your career’s impact.

 

Structure

Project Ideation

  • Sessions 1-7: Throughout the Learning Phase, you’re encouraged to brainstorm potential project ideas that align with the course content. This period allows you to gather insights, identify areas of interest, and begin formulating a project concept.
  • Before Session 8: Use the Project Planning Template to start generating project ideas.
  • Session 8: Refine your project ideas with feedback from peers. 

Project Idea Form

  • Between Sessions 8 and 9: Decide which project idea you want to pursue and submit the project details form.
    • You’ll include a brief description of your project idea, objectives, and expected outcomes.
  • The BlueDot team will review your submission, and we may provide further guidance on how you can improve and clarify your project plan.
  • We will also check for potential information hazards. It’s unlikely that you would generate any serious infohazards over the course of your 4-week project, and this step is just to give you peace of mind that you’re getting a second opinion on this!

Independent Work and Peer Feedback

  • Sessions 9-12: The focus shifts to executing your project. While the bulk of the work will be done independently, you will continue to engage with your project cohort in weekly meetings. 
  • Each week, you are expected to:
    • Do 3-5 hours of independent work on your project
    • Attend the weekly session, which will comprise of:
      • 1 hour giving and receiving feedback with peers
      • 1 hour structured co-working[1]

Project Submission

  • After session 12, you’ll finalise your project and prepare a deliverable of your work. This could be a research paper, a policy proposal, a technical report, a video presentation, or another format that best suits your project’s nature and goals.
  • You are encouraged to make your deliverable publicly accessible, such as publishing it on platforms like GitHub, YouTube, or a personal blog. Sharing your work helps to disseminate your findings and contributions to a broader audience.

Evaluation and Presentation

  • Project submissions will be anonymised and evaluated by a panel of experts, including course facilitators. For transparency, these are the criteria that they will use for evaluation.
  • At the course’s closing event, the top submissions will be invited to present their work to the entire course. This is an excellent opportunity to receive feedback, refine your presentation skills, and showcase your achievements.
  • After these presentations, everyone will have the opportunity to discuss their projects in 1-1s with other students. 

Job Opportunities and Introductions

  • We will introduce the students with the best projects to relevant experts in the biosecurity community, and we will help them find opportunities to have a huge impact. 

Properties of exceptional projects

At BlueDot Impact we’ve evaluated over 250 projects across our Pandemics, AI Alignment and AI Governance courses. Of the most exceptional submissions we’ve seen, most have the following features in common:

  • The project has clear, specific scope
  • There is an attempt at novelty
  • The project makes use of existing expertise
  • The project deliverable is clearly communicated

Clear, specific scope

The project has a clear question, hypothesis or measurable goal. The more empirical this is, e.g. at the end of your project you can answer your question with "yes/no" or "by X amount", the better. By checking in on this question/hypothesis/goal throughout your Project, you can measure your progress towards arriving at an answer[2].

One aspect of doing this well is to define what is ‘out of scope’ for your project before you start. Going out of scope might look like trying to answer a much bigger question than you originally intended, or pursuing many tangents that aren’t essential for helping you answer your original question. If you catch yourself doing something out-of-scope, either drag yourself back to the main question or (more rarely) reconsider if you should change your scope.

Attempt at novelty

This doesn’t need to be a groundbreaking novel research paper. It could be an explainer of a concept that’s more clearly written or illustrated than anything that already exists.

It’s easier than you might think to become the world expert in a thing if you make that thing specific enough (see above) and apply your existing skills to a new area (see below).

Using existing expertise

Consider your existing skills and how you could apply those to biosecurity topics. 

You could be in the top 1% of statisticians in the world[3], and have a top 1% understanding of biosecurity[4]. By using the intersection of these skills, this would put you in the top ~0.01%[5] of people to model the effects of specific biosecurity interventions on disease spread.

Some other examples:

  • If you have a background in finance, you could consider which financial regulations should be lifted and applied to the DNA synthesis industry.
  • If you’re interested in animal advocacy, you could think about the impact of specific animal welfare interventions on the risk of zoonotic spillover.
  • If you make videos as a hobby, consider making a video explaining a specific technology that you studied on the course.

Clarity of communication

Regardless of topic, a clearly-communicated project often ends up in our top 20% of submissions. Make sure to present your project in simple language, take time to explain what you did and why. This is so important that we’ve included an entire resource this week dedicated to it.

 

Tips for success

  • Aim for exceptional: When generating project ideas, keep in mind the ‘properties of exceptional projects’ above. Keep asking yourself the following questions:
    • What is the clear question/hypothesis/goal for this project?
    • In what ways is this novel?
    • How is this using my existing strengths?
    • If you’re unconvinced by your answers to any of the above, consider picking a different project idea.
  • Iterative development: Aim to create a minimal viable product (MVP), proof of concept or essay draft early in the Project Phase. Use feedback from your cohort and facilitators to iterate and improve on drafts as early in the process as possible.
  • Leverage feedback: Regularly seek input from peers, mentors, and the broader biosecurity community. Constructive criticism will help you identify and address any weaknesses in your project.
  • Time management: Allocate dedicated time each week for project work. Consistent effort, even if it’s just a few hours weekly, will significantly enhance your progress and final outcome. For example, you might add a 4-hour slot to your calendar every Thursday evening for working on your project.
  • Ask for help: Don’t hesitate to reach out for assistance. Use the resources available, including your facilitators, cohort members, and the Slack workspace, to overcome challenges and stay motivated.

 

Examples of previous projects

You can find examples of standout projects from previous course iterations here.

 

Prizes for exceptional projects

We are offering prizes for standout projects across a range of categories. You can find more details here.

 

FAQs

Can I work on a project with someone else?
Yes, as long as everyone in the group contributes and learns during the project. However, we expect most participants to do projects independently.

If you have already agreed to work on a project with someone else, please indicate this in the project idea form that we send around the time of session 8.

Can I work on a project about [topic X]?
Yes, probably. As long as it’s legal and you can draw a connection between the work you’re doing and benefitting pandemic preparedness, we’re likely happy for you to do it. We recommend asking your facilitator if you’re still uncertain.

Is it okay to work on a project that I have already started? (e.g. before the course start)
In general, we encourage participants to pursue new ideas because these are likely better informed by the knowledge gained in the course and tend to be more relevant to pandemic preparedness. However, continuing an existing project is fine as long as it meets the same bar for relevance as any other project and will produce a deliverable to submit after session 12.

What if English isn’t my first language?

It depends what your goals are for the project! We encourage you to write up your project in whichever language you think is most likely to help you achieve your goals:

  • If you are doing a project to better understand a specific problem or intervention, you may gain more by thinking it through in your native language than coming up against language blocks trying to write it in English. 
  • If you are writing a project for a specific target audience, write in the language that would be most appropriate for that audience. 
  • If you’d like to use the project as part of a personal portfolio, it may be useful to have an English copy.

If you are writing your project in a non-English language, we encourage you to use translation software and submit 2 copies (one in your native language and one in English) for us to evaluate.

Footnotes

  1. What is structured co-working? 

    • Everyone will stay on the cohort call and work silently on their own projects. 
    • At the start of the hour, everyone will state what they intend to get done in the session. 
    • At the end, there will be a check-in on what people managed to complete.

     

    Can’t I just work on my project in my own time?

    • There are many aspects of this kind of co-working, including increased accountability and focus, which help people get more work done. You can read more about the science of co-working here.
    • If you don’t find these parts of the session valuable, you’re welcome to drop off the call after an hour and work on your project in your own time.
    • If you find these parts of the sessions super-valuable, let your facilitator and/or the BlueDot team know and we’ll try to provide more opportunities for this kind of co-working.

  2. This doesn’t have to be quantitative! Imagine your goal is to write an explainer about CRISPR-based diagnostic tools for non-biologists. You should aim to get an early draft in front of your target audience as early as possible. Ask them which bits they find confusing, clarifying and what remaining questions they have. Use this feedback to guide your next draft.

  3. e.g. if you studied a maths degree

  4. e.g. if you’d spent 35 hours over the last 7 weeks reading about and discussing it

  5. Actual statisticians will be able to point out all the oversimplifications and assumptions here, but I hope you can see the rough point.

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