Please join the Clements and Strauss Centers on Wednesday, April 4, for a talk with Edward You, an expert on Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for a talk on "Safeguarding the Bioeconomy: Challenges to Data Security, Health, and National Security." This event, which is free and open to the public, will be held at the LBJ School of Public Affairs (SRH 3.122) from 12:15 – 1:30 p.m. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology.
Edward You is a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Biological Countermeasures Unit. Mr. You is responsible for creating programs and activities to coordinate and improve FBI and interagency efforts to identify, assess and respond to biological threats or incidents. These efforts include expanding FBI outreach to the Life Sciences community to address biosecurity. Before being promoted to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Mr. You was a member of the FBI Los Angeles Field Office Joint Terrorism Task Force and served on the FBI Hazardous Evidence Response Team.
Mr. You has also been directly involved in policymaking efforts with a focus on biosecurity. He served as an active Working Group member of the National Security Council Policy Coordinating Committee on Countering Biological Threats and is currently the Ex Officio member of the National Institutes of Health National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. He also serves on two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committees, the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Microbial Threats and the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law’s Forum on Synthetic Biology.
Prior to joining the FBI, Mr. You worked for six years in graduate research focusing on retrovirology and human gene therapy at the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine. He subsequently worked for three years at the biotechnology firm AMGEN Inc. in cancer research.