Senior Researcher, Civil Safety Sciences

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🕒 May 27

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Future of Life Institute (FLI)

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

11 - 50 employees

Founded 2014

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

🧬 Biotechnology

🤝 Non-profit

💰 $482.5k Grant on 2021-11

Artificial Intelligence • Biotechnology • Non-profit

Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a non-profit organization dedicated to steering transformative technologies, such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology, towards benefiting life and minimizing large-scale risks. The Institute focuses on cause areas like artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nuclear weapons, advocating for policy changes and public awareness to mitigate associated risks. FLI engages in policy advocacy, outreach, grantmaking, and hosting events to discuss safe development and governance of these technologies. It collaborates internationally with entities like the United Nations and the European Union to ensure that powerful technologies are harnessed for positive future outcomes.

📋 Description

• Conduct structured horizon-scanning for novel AI-enabled hazard classes, and develop methodologies for reasoning rigorously about threats that lack historical base rates or established scientific communities • Investigate next-generation detection sciences, such as dynamic and adaptive pathogen surveillance, and analogous open-ended approaches for other emerging hazard modalities • Pursue feasibility analyses on deep resilience and lifeline capacities engineered to function when conventional infrastructure, sunlight, or centralized coordination cannot be assumed • Analyze biosphere-scale vulnerabilities, including geoengineering, synthetic microbes for terraforming or remediation, and nontraditional environmental toxicology arising from AI-enabled activity • Identify and selectively advance defensive, stabilizing, and transparency-enhancing technologies whose differential acceleration favors humanity • Develop scientific metaresearch on how evidence is generated, aggregated, and translated into action where conventional empirical feedback loops are weak • Build scientific coordination capacity through standards, convenings, and cross-border working relationships, and equip frontline responders and community networks with usable decision support • Co-author grant applications, build analytical tools that make catastrophic risks more legible, and translate findings for policymakers, technical audiences, and the public • Collaborate across CARMA programs to integrate civil safety perspectives with broader risk assessment, governance, and technical safety workstreams

🎯 Requirements

• Advanced degree (PhD or >1 MS preferred) in a hard-science or engineering discipline, with demonstrated breadth across multiple natural science fields. Strong candidates may come from any of, or combinations across: biosecurity, microbiology, ecology, environmental or atmospheric science, agricultural and food systems science, chemistry, materials science, physics, public health, biomedical or systems engineering, resilience engineering, security sciences, or related fields • Substantive familiarity with adversarial environments and adversarial reasoning, broadly construed: grounded in security studies, biosecurity, cybersecurity, defense analysis, red-teaming, safety engineering, dual-use technology assessment, or comparable experience reasoning rigorously about deliberate misuse and worst-case dynamics • Demonstrated ability to reason carefully about hazards that lack robust historical data or settled detection paradigms • 5+ years of relevant research or applied experience, with a track record of running independent projects from framing through delivery • Strong publication record or equivalent body of work on technological risk, resilience, detection science, or related domains • Excellent written and verbal communication, with proven ability to translate technical content for policymakers, funders, and non-specialist audiences • Systems thinking and comfort with substantial uncertainty and rapidly shifting knowledge landscapes • Substantive grounding in modern AI capabilities and trajectories, sufficient to anticipate how advancing AI reshapes threat and defense landscapes in your areas of work • Self-directed, with sound judgment for identifying high-leverage problems under broad rather than micromanaged direction