How to do an excellent biosecurity project

The Project Phase is designed to help you apply your knowledge and create meaningful contributions to the field of pandemic preparedness. This blog post provides an overview of what to expect.

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.

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 500 projects across our Pandemics, AI Alignment and AI Governance courses. The most exceptional submissions often 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. 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. We have linked to resources throughout the project phase with guidance to help you write more clearly.

 

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.
• Seek feedback early: 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.

 

Prizes for exceptional projects

To help you generate project ideas, we suggest five categories to focus on:

• Simple explainers
• Novel research (qualitative)
• Novel research (quantitative)
• COVID-19 analysis
• Build a thing

In each category, we are offering a prize of £200 for the best project and £50 for the runner up[6].

These prizes are intended to celebrate great achievements, highlight exceptional work, and incentivise working on important parts of problems. We have provided more information about the project evaluation criteria here.

 

Simple explainers

What? A blogpost, interview, graphic[7] or video that clearly explains a concept or technology in biosecurity or pandemic preparedness.

Why? There is a lot of good research out there that is jargon-heavy and difficult to understand[8]. By distilling this information into a simple explainer, you will improve your own understanding of the topic, as well as helping others who want to learn about it.

Examples: 

• Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) for pandemic pathogen diagnostics by Julia Niggemeyer
• Wastewater Epidemiology for Biosecurity – Demystified by Genevieve Rogers
• Diagnosing infectious diseases with CRISPR: SHERLOCK and DETECTR explained by Adam Jones

 

Novel research (qualitative)

What? A blogpost or interview that aims to answer a novel question in biosecurity or pandemic preparedness. 

Why? Pandemic preparedness is a very broad field, and there are many questions which haven’t even been asked, let alone answered. Remember, novel research doesn’t need to be groundbreaking! It could just come from asking a very specific question or using your existing experience from a different field.

Examples: 

• Disinformation Security: making LLMs safer by lying to them by Chris Rodriguez
• Critical review of modelling strategies against pandemics by Jérémy Andréoletti
• What can we learn from financial regulations for DNA synthesis screening?

 

Novel research (quantitative)

What? Epidemiological modelling, cost-benefit or some other kind of quantitative analysis that aims to answer a novel question in biosecurity or pandemic preparedness. We recommend only doing this type of project if you already have relevant experience for the type of quantitative analysis you are doing.

Why? Pandemic preparedness is a very broad field, and there are many questions which haven’t even been asked, let alone answered. Remember, novel research doesn’t need to be groundbreaking! It could just come from asking a very specific question or using your existing experience from a different field.

Examples:

• A cost-benefit analysis of clinical metagenomic sequencing for every person presenting to the emergency room with respiratory symptoms in [specific city].
• A cost-benefit analysis of installing a Corsi-Rosenthal box in every office in [specific country].

 

COVID-19 analysis

What? A simple explainer or piece of novel research focussed on learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why? We’ve had a warning shot of what a severe pandemic looks like in our globalised modern world, and how prepared we currently are to deal with it. There is a huge amount of data out there, and way more we should be learning from this.

Examples:

• How COVID-19 Vaccine Government Announcements Varied by Country (NZ and UK Edition) by Demelza Robinson
• How did different countries support wages during the COVID-19 pandemic? Similar to this explainer from Institute for Government.
• What can we learn from Operation Warp Speed and how could we apply this to other diseases? Similar to this article from Institute for Progress.

 

Build a thing

What? Build an interactive tool or physical product which is relevant for biosecurity or pandemic preparedness.

Why? Biosecurity needs more entrepreneurs! Prototyping and iterating a product is a great way to start developing this skill. We've written a guide for doing this with minimal coding experience.

Examples:

• Project BEACON by Neha Suresh
• PPE explainer by Neha Singh

 

Other exceptional projects

Prizes: We may offer discretionary prizes to projects that fall outside the previous five categories.

Why? Excellence often doesn’t fit into nice boxes. This prize recognises outstanding projects that don’t fit into the other prize categories we’ve defined. If you've got a great idea then go for it!

Examples:

• Time for Biosafety Level 5 by Easton Smith

 

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.

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.

    

   Why do structured co-working?

   • 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.
   • Over 50% of the prize-winning projects from the last round said that co-working was one of the most useful parts of the Project Phase for helping them deliver their project.

2. This doesn’t have to be quantitative! Imagine your goal is to write an explainer about CRISPR-based diagnostic tools that non-biologists can understand. 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.

6. All prizes will be awarded at the discretion of the BlueDot Impact team. We reserve the right to not award a prize in a certain category if none of the submissions meet the requisite quality bar.

7. Biorender is a great tool for making biological visualisations.

8. You may have found this yourself with some of the resources in the course. As course designers, we frequently found it frustrating that there wasn’t anything better-written on a specific topic.