Blog

No, there are not hundreds of cloud labs in biology

Disputing claims about the proliferation of cloud labs in biology and their biosecurity risk.

Scaling US pathogen detection

Modeling how a federal biosurveillance program could detect known and novel pathogens using metagenomic sequencing.

Pooled Lab Discards for Pathogen Detection

Exploring pooled clinical lab discards as a cheap, high-coverage sampling strategy for pathogen detection.

LLMs Outperform Experts on Challenging Biology Benchmarks

Tracking LLM performance on biology benchmarks over three years shows models now outperform human experts on certain knowledge benchmarks.

An Update on Our Air Sampling Research

Our review on indoor air sampling for detecting viral nucleic acids is published in the Journal of Aerosol Science.

Exploring Blood-Based Biosurveillance, Part 3: The Blood Virome

Characterizing the blood virome and what it means for blood-based pathogen surveillance.

How to Grow (Almost) Anything

My personal project page for MIT’s How to Grow (Almost) Anything course.

Strategies for effective pathogen-agnostic biosurveillance in the United States

Some ideas for pathogen-agnostic biosurveillance systems in the United States.

Trendlines in AIxBio evals

An analysis of model performance on biology benchmarks

Exploring Blood-Based Biosurveillance, Part 2: Sampling Strategies within the US Blood Supply

Analyzing sampling strategies within the U.S. blood supply for novel pathogen detection.

EC2 Runtime Alerts to Reduce AWS Costs

A simple Lambda-based alert system to catch forgotten EC2 instances before they rack up costs.

Exploring Blood-Based Biosurveillance, Part 1: Blood as a Sample Type

Evaluating blood as a sample type for detecting novel viral pathogens.

Optimizing costs for unused EC2 instances on AWS

Backing up and terminating idle EC2 instances to reduce unnecessary AWS storage costs.

New preprint: Indoor air sampling for viral nucleic acids

A new preprint exploring air sampling as a promising approach for early detection of airborne pathogens.

Integrating the Opentrons heating module into PyLabRobot

Integrating the Opentrons temperature module into PyLabRobot for automated heating and cooling.

Ten-fold serial dilution on an Opentrons

Setting up a ten-fold serial dilution workflow on the Opentrons robot using PyLabRobot.