Tessa Alexanian likes too many things

My Deal

I want to steer towards nice futures for biotechnology.

Since early 2024, I've been working at IBBIS on open tools and standards for nucleic acid synthesis screening. My aim is to increase the share of orders for which sequences and customers are screened and support standards that are both inclusive and rigorous.

Other Projects

• GCBR Organization Updates regular updates from ~20 orgs working to reduce catastrophic biorisks
• Catalyst: a collaborative biosecurity summit instigated a one-day conference on innovation for biorisks (2020)
• Effective Altruism Global San Francisco coordinated the volunteers (2017, 2018, & 2019)
• Abortion Policy API wrote nearly all the code, did some of the project management (2017-2023)
• East Bay Biosecurity Group a meetup about pandemics, biohacking, and other biosecurity topics (2018-2020)

I Give Talks

• More AI-Resilient Biosecurity with the Paraphrase Project Microsoft Research Podcast. October 6, 2025.
• Biosecurity: A Governance Perspective EAGxBerlin. September 17, 2022.
• Synthethic Biology and GCBRs Hear This Idea Podcast. September 21, 2022.
• How do we build a culture of responsible disclosure? Global Community Bio Summit. October 10, 2020.
• Biotech Robotic Cloud Labs: During the Pandemic and Onwards After iGEM Panel. June 20, 2020.
• Life isn't logical! It's hard to put NOR gates in bacteria! !!Con 2019. May 11, 2019.
• How biology has changed EA Global San Francisco. June 9, 2018.

I Write Things

• Is That DNA Dangerous? Asimov Press, August 2024.
• Supporting Follow-Up Screening for Flagged Nucleic Acid Synthesis Orders Council on Strategic Risks, May 2024.
• Develop a Screening Framework Guidance for AI-Enabled Automated Labs Federation of American Scientists AI x Bio Sprint, December 2023.
• A Biosecurity and Biorisk Reading+ List Effective Altruism Forum, March 2021.
• How to Run A High-Energy Reading Group Effective Altruism Forum, February 2021.
• Habitable Zones L4 Society Zine, December 2020.
• How I Learned to Stop Pipetting and Love the Robots Zymergen Technology Blog, May 2020.
• Inviting the world to participate in synthetic biology. iGEM Digest, January 2020.
• The Case for Modular Lab Automation Zymergen Technology Blog, October 2019.
• Human Practices matters at every stage of your iGEM project iGEM Blog, August 2019.
• Zymergen Technology Team Values Zymergen Technology Blog, March 2019.
• Three Biosecurity Lessons I Learned from iGEM Medium, December 2017.