SynBioBeta Speaker
Tessa Alexanian
IBBIS
Technical Lead
Tessa Alexanian is trying to steer towards nice futures for biotechnology. Her current focus is open-source tools for nucleic acid synthesis screening at IBBIS, the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science. Previously, Tessa wrangled robots to do bioengineering for four years at Zymergen, served for two years at the iGEM Competition’s Safety and Security officer, and collaborated with organizations including NTI | bio, and RAND. She was a 2023 Council on Strategic Fellow for Ending Bioweapons, a 2022 ELBI fellow, 2020 Foresight Fellow, and 2017 iGEM BWC delegate.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Tessa
This Year
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Business of Biology
Synthesis Screening in the Age of Powerful AI
As AI reshapes what's possible in biology, biosecurity needs to keep up. Nucleic acid synthesis screening, which checks what's being ordered and by whom, is one of the field's most important lines of defense. But as AI capabilities advance, the screening infrastructure needs to evolve with them. This panel brings together leaders from the Sequence Biosecurity Risk Consortium, Fourth Eon Bio, SecureDNA, and BioTrust to discuss how sequence and customer screening are adapting to a new threat landscape.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Tessa Alexanian
IBBIS
Technical Lead
•
-
Business of Biology
Synthesis Screening in the Age of Powerful AI
As AI reshapes what's possible in biology, biosecurity needs to keep up. Nucleic acid synthesis screening, which checks what's being ordered and by whom, is one of the field's most important lines of defense. But as AI capabilities advance, the screening infrastructure needs to evolve with them. This panel brings together leaders from the Sequence Biosecurity Risk Consortium, Fourth Eon Bio, SecureDNA, and BioTrust to discuss how sequence and customer screening are adapting to a new threat landscape.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Tessa Alexanian
IBBIS
Technical Lead
Session lineup still growing
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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-
Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
