Sam Weiss Evans is a Senior Advisor for Biosecurity and Global Risk at the Federation of American Scientists. He is currently working with a range of organizations to shepherd reforms in the governance of security, safety, and responsible innovation in biotechnology. Prior to joining FAS, Sam was a Senior Policy Advisor for the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, where he led the Commission’s work on biosecurity, biosafety, standards, and responsible innovation. Before that, Sam was a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University, jointly with the Kennedy School of Government’s Program on Science, Technology & Society, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Harvard Data Science Initiative.
He has spent the past twenty years studying and building experimental governance capacity in bioengineering and several other areas of emerging technology. His experiments run the gamut of the research and innovation life cycle, as well as the scale from personal to international levels of governing.
Sam’s academic background includes a focus on science and technology studies (STS), critical security studies, and organizational analysis. He holds a B.A. in Physics and Philosophy from St. Olaf College and a M.S. in Management Research from Oxford University. His D.Phil., also from Oxford, was a study of the dual use list modification processes of the Wassenaar Arrangement, a multilateral export control regime for conventional arms and dual use goods and technologies. He has also held positions in the STS Programs at the University of California, Berkeley and Tufts University. He maintains a Research Affiliate position with the Program on Emerging Technology at MIT.