Experimental Governance for science and security
Building the institutions
to advance democracy, security, and emerging technology.
Senior Advisor at the Federation of American Scientists, working to bring about foundational biosecurity and biosafety governance reform. What if we could use that as a test of larger reforms in the relationship between science, the state, and security?
Current and recent work
Federation of American Scientists
Senior Advisor, 2026–present. Leading foundational reform of US biosecurity and biosafety governance, and the political and technical work to enact it across government.
National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology
Senior Policy Advisor, 2023–2025. Led the Commission’s work on biosecurity, biosafety, standards, and responsible innovation.
Twenty years in the academy
Research, institution building, and teaching positions at Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Tufts, and Oxford. Two decades studying and building experimental governance capacity in emerging technology.
About
Reform grounded in practice
Sam combines a deep understanding of how the institutions and processes of research and innovation work with broad networks of professionals from biosafety officers to entrepreneurs to government officials. He has built, run, and studied efforts to reform the ways we identify and govern concerns in emerging technology (especially biotechnology) from the individual lab to international organizations, and across the research and innovation lifecycle.
“Two questions: ‘Is this a good idea?’ and ‘How is this going to go wrong?’ We cannot answer either very well. Yet.”
— Sam Weiss Evans
Get in touch
sam@evansresearch.org · Washington, DC