Reliable early warning for catastrophic biothreats

COVID-19 has demonstrated that we are profoundly vulnerable to biological threats. The pandemic killed millions of people and wreaked enormous economic damage across the world. The next pandemic could be far worse.

To defend ourselves against future catastrophe, we must begin preparation now.

Early detection of outbreaks can make a profound difference to the harm they cause. To protect society against future pandemics, we need detection systems that can warn us when a new pandemic agent is spreading in the population. The Nucleic Acid Observatory project aims to pioneer widespread, pathogen-agnostic, untargeted metagenomic sequencing of our environment to provide reliable early warning of all biological threats – including those we have never seen before.

To achieve this, we're developing and deploying experimental tools to quantify the sensitivity of monitoring in the field, building models and running simulations to predict the performance of different detection strategies at scale, and developing novel computational approaches to detect every possible threat as early as we can.

If you want to help safeguard our future, we encourage you to make a general application to work with us. We expect to have more open positions available in the near future.

Our team

  • Leadership

    Kevin Esvelt — Assistant Professor, MIT Media Lab

    Will Bradshaw — Research scientist & NAO co-lead

    Michael McLaren — Research scientist & NAO co-lead

    Team

    Jeff Kaufman — Staff software engineer

    Olivia Hershey — Research scientist

    Dan Rice — Research scientist

    Lennart Justen — Research assistant

    Simon Grimm — Visiting student & data analyst

    Ari Machtinger — Research technician

Work with us

If you think you have the skills and background to help us make a difference, we want to hear from you.

At present, all roles are in-person in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We may consider exceptional applications for remote work.

We are not currently considering applications for internships, summer studentships, or similar roles.

If you are excited by our work, but don’t see any open roles that match your skills, we encourage you to make a general application. We aim to review all applications and may reach out if we think you might be a good fit.

As an MIT research group, we are an equal opportunity employer. Women, people of color, and self-identified minorities are especially encouraged to apply!