Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness

Pandemics have the potential to cause significant, and perhaps unprecedented, harm. We believe natural pandemics represent one of the biggest current risks to global welfare and stability, and the risks from engineered pandemics — whether via accidents or misuse — may grow in the future. We’re interested in supporting the strengthening of disease surveillance, the governance of dual use research, policy development, or other activities that could reduce the threat of a major global disruption. We see relatively little philanthropic support in this area, and believe that philanthropy may have an important role to play, distinct from that of government.

For more on why we chose biosecurity and pandemic preparedness as a focus area, see our public cause report (January 2014) [1], used in our process for selecting focus areas [2].

Illustrative grants

A complete list of our grants in the area of biosecurity and pandemic preparedness can be found here [3]. Grants include:

Andrew Snyder-Beattie

Andrew Snyder-Beattie [6] leads Open Philanthropy’s work on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. He previously spent five years at the Future of Humanity Institute (University of Oxford), where he worked as a program manager and later as Director of Research, developing programs across the institute including those in biosecurity and systemic risk. Prior to that, he was a researcher at a personalized medicine startup. He holds a PhD/DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford and is an alumnus of the Johns Hopkins Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative.