IBBIS

We have a few projects where a fellow could accelerate our efforts on global DNA synthesis screening. We would expect fellows to work in one of the following project areas:

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1. Robust, automated customer screening, including better recognition of AI-generated forgery. IBBIS is developing a minimal KYC standard for nucleic acid synthesis screening. A fellow could contribute to our customer test set, which currently contains realistic ambiguously legitimate customers, by adding adversarially-forged false identities. A fellow could also work on automated API or LLM harness checks that would (1) rapidly identify legitimate customers; (2) surface uncertainties in an easy-to-review way; and (3) flag signs of forgery, supporting low-cost global customer screening.
2. Enhancing the Global DNA Synthesis Map with real-time updates. We provide a resource on global DNA synthesis providers and governance, which was primarily curated in 2025. We would like to update this resource and develop approaches to automate the identification and tracking of DNA synthesis companies globally, while assessing the map website with new features, including improved data presentation and access.
3. Improving benchtop security with on-device screening. We create a locally-distributed synthesis screening tool, but haven't developed a comprehensive strategy for ensuring that it can operate in a tamper-resistant fashion that allows required security updates, while still providing mostly-offline local screening. There are many sub-sections of this problem that are fellow-sized (e.g. "help us scope out telemetry architectures for requiring updates").
4. Improving annotations of SOC hits. When a provider receives a flag from our software, they need to know what to do next: should they request additional information from the user (a license? extra information about legitimacy?). We'd like to add additional functional and mechanistic information for authorized users of our software. A fellow could add an annotation module for a bounded set of SOCs + assess how to distribute those annotations only to authorized users.

Each fellow will have a weekly 1:1 with their mentor for high-level project guidance (though some weeks may be missed due to travel constraints). Fellows will be invited to join our Slack instance for async communication with their mentors and the rest of the IBBIS team. Mentors are in different timezones (California, Argentina) and IBBIS is a primarily remote organization that typically offers minimal supervision.