Geoff Ralston, Charlie Petty
We are looking for fellows with a significant background in the biological sciences and/or a founder's perspective to work on and support the Bio Action Plan.
Stream overview
We would like to work on the Bio Action Plan with the fellow, exploring what needs to be added, changed, investigated, etc.
The Bio Action Plan is a five-year, $2.5B roadmap for defending against catastrophic biological risk in the age of AI. Its premise is that AI and increasingly accessible biotech are lowering the barriers to engineering dangerous pathogens faster than defenses are improving, and that the defensive technologies largely already exist. What's missing is coordinated, fast deployment. The plan organizes the response into three pillars: Prevent (constraining misuse upstream, e.g. nucleic acid synthesis screening, KYC, AI-bio safeguards), Detect (pathogen-agnostic early warning and diagnostics), and Defend (rapid medical countermeasures, workforce protection, built-environment biohardening, response coordination), spanning eleven priorities, each with year-by-year milestones.
Mentors
Geoff was a partner at Y Combinator beginning in 2011 and served as president of the accelerator from early 2019 until the end of 2022. Geoff has worked with hundreds of YC companies like Stripe, Ginkgo, Clever, Helion and Boom and has been an angel investor in over 100 companies. Earlier in his career Geoff was part of the team that built Yahoo! Mail and was Yahoo!’s Chief Product Officer until 2006. Geoff was also CEO of Lala Media, which was purchased by Apple in 2009.
Charlie is co-head of Intercept, a $500 million fund launched from Stripe's Public Goods team to reduce the burden of respiratory infections. Charlie was previously a Managing Director at the Global Health Investment Corporation and a co-founder of Adjuvant Capital. Before his career in public health investing, he was a private equity investor at Artemis Capital Partners and Axia Capital. Charlie started his career at Haiti’s largest microfinance bank, Sevis Finansye Fonkoze.
Charlie has led or participated in investments in Curevo Vaccine (acquired by Eli Lilly), Vaccine Company (acquired by Eli Lilly), Alydia Health (acquired by Merck), Iantech (acquired by Carl Zeiss Meditec), Eubiologics (Kosdaq:206650), MDGH (PRV), Terrestrial Bio, Foundry, Centivax, Excision Biotherapeutics, Codagnix, Endpoint Health, Cytovale, and Monod Bio. He currently serves on the boards of Curevo Vaccine, Aceris Biosciences, Blueprint Biosecurity, ProEquip, and the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund.
Mentorship style
Fellows we are looking for
We are looking for fellows with a significant background in the biological sciences and expertise in bio security would be a bonus. A knowledge of public health and pandemic preparedness would also be a bonus. An interest in and strong opinions on these things will be very helpful. I'm also looking for a fellow to take a founder's perspective towards building an organization which can be effective at turning a plan into a reality.
Project selection
The Winter 2026 cohort offers a wide range of research streams led by experts across AI alignment, interpretability, governance, and safety. Each stream provides its own research agenda, methodology, and mentorship focus.
