Tessa Alexanian
Bio
Tessa Alexanian is a biosecurity professional and engineer focused on steering biotechnology toward positive futures. She is the Technical Lead for the Common Mechanism at IBBIS (International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science), an international baseline for nucleic acid synthesis screening aimed at preventing misuse of synthetic biology. She holds an engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and spent four years as a lab automation engineer at Zymergen before serving two years as Safety and Security officer for the iGEM Competition. She has been organizing biosecurity events in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2018, founding the East Bay Biosecurity Group and co-instigating the Catalyst biosecurity summit, which brought together Bay Area biotech industry professionals, DIY biologists, and biosecurity researchers. She is a 2023 Council on Strategic Risks Fellow for Ending Bioweapons, a 2022 ELBI fellow, and a 2020 Foresight Fellow. She has collaborated with Open Philanthropy, NTI|bio, RAND, and the Federation of American Scientists, and co-authors the GCBR Organization Updates newsletter covering global catastrophic biological risk.
Links
- Personal Website
- https://tessa.fyi/
- Twitter / X
- LessWrong
- tessa-a
Grants
from Long-Term Future Fund
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Details
- Last Updated
- Mar 23, 2026, 1:28 AM UTC
- Created
- Mar 20, 2026, 2:59 AM UTC