Research Scientist (Virologist), Chem-Bio

About the AI Security Institute

The AI Security Institute is the world's largest and best-funded team dedicated to understanding advanced AI risks and translating that knowledge into action. We’re in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10 (the Prime Minister's office), and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.

We’re here because governments are critical for advanced AI going well, and UK AISI is uniquely positioned to mobilise them. With our resources, unique agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.

The deadline for applying to this role is 6th September 2026, end of day, anywhere on Earth.

About the team

AISI's Chem Bio (CB) team conducts technical research to assess evolving AI capabilities related to science R&D and CB misuse, and the effectiveness of technical safeguards that might mitigate risks arising from those capabilities.

The goal of our research is to inform critical decisions on security, opportunities, policy, and risk mitigation made by governments and AI developers.

We're a close-knit, unusually interdisciplinary team—made up of machine learning researchers and engineers, software engineers, virologists and bacteriologists, behavioural research scientists, biosecurity experts, long-standing CB policy specialists and talented generalists—who work closely with other technical and policy teams across government.

Over the next twelve months CB will hugely scale the range and complexity of the evaluations and research programmes it carries out, and engage more deeply with partners in major AI labs, the wider biotech and pharma ecosystem and security services than it ever has before.

About the role

AI capabilities in the life sciences are advancing faster than at any point in history. Foundation models can now design novel proteins and interpret genomic sequences. Specialised biological models can both identify drug targets and design the compound to target them. These are extraordinary tools for scientific progress, but also have the potential for harm if misused.

This role is for a senior technical expert who can bring deep virology and biosecurity judgement to that mission. You will sit directly alongside the CB team’s researchers, helping design and interpret evaluations of how frontier and specialised AI systems perform on biologically relevant tasks, with a particular focus on pathogens and virology-relevant capabilities. You will help translate ambiguous biological risk questions into rigorous empirical evaluations, identify where model outputs are scientifically meaningful versus merely plausible-sounding, and advise on the mitigations, safeguards and evidence standards needed before those results can inform policy. It is a role at the interface of virology, AI evaluation, and biosecurity: shaping what we test, how we test it, and how we explain the significance of our findings to government and external partners.

What you will own

• Design risk-relevant biology evaluations: Design, develop and execute evaluations that test the frontier biological capabilities and risk-relevant behaviours of frontier and specialised AI models, with a particular focus on virology-relevant tasks.
• Translate research objectives into rigorous evidence:Help turn ambiguous biological risk questions into rigorous empirical claims, identifying the right evaluation designs, evidence standards, scoring rubrics and expert review processes needed to support high-confidence conclusions.
• Interpret evaluation results responsibly: Analyse and interpret evaluation findings, including their limitations, uncertainty, false-positive and false-negative risks, and implications for capabilities and risk.
• Communicate to decision-makers: Produce clear technical reports, briefings and recommendations for senior decision-makers within government and other trusted partners, translating complex scientific and AI-safety evidence into actionable conclusions.
• Collaborate across expert communities: Work closely with researchers, engineers, biosecurity experts, policy teams, AI safety specialists and external scientific partners to ensure AISI’s evaluations are technically rigorous and policy-relevant.

Role requirements

• Deep virology or microbiology expertise. You have a PhD in virology, microbiology, infectious disease, molecular biology or a closely related field, or equivalent practical experience. You have worked deeply on pathogenic viruses, bacteria, host-pathogen interactions, infectious disease, agricultural pathogens or another relevant area of applied microbiology, and can bring real scientific judgement to questions about what is biologically meaningful and experimentally plausible.
• Credibility with technical researchers. You can work directly with researchers and engineers on difficult, ambiguous technical problems. You do not need to be a machine learning researcher, but you need to be fluent enough in frontier AI and AI-enabled biology to engage seriously with model evaluations, experimental design, research trade-offs and what “good” evidence looks like.
• Strong empirical judgement.You know how to design, critique and interpret evaluations or experiments where the answer is not known in advance. You can identify limitations, confounders, weak proxies, evidential gaps and cases where results are being over- or under-interpreted. You care about turning ambiguous risk questions into rigorous empirical claims.
• Dual-use/biosecurity risk assessment experience. You have experience applying biosecurity principles to emerging technologies, ideally including AI systems, large language models, biological design tools or other AI-enabled scientific workflows. You can reason clearly about capability, tacit knowledge, real-world bottlenecks and the difference between theoretical and practically meaningful risk.
• Discretion and sound judgement. You understand that work at the intersection of AI and biology carries dual-use sensitivity. You are comfortable operating with appropriate discretion, working within sensitive or classified constraints where needed, and making sound trade-offs between openness, security, pace and scientific rigour.
• Clear communication for decision-makers. You can translate complex scientific, technical and safety evidence into clear reports, briefings and recommendations for senior decision-makers, within and outside government. You can communicate uncertainty without blurring the bottom line.
• Collaborative interdisciplinary working.You can work effectively with researchers, engineers, policy specialists, biosecurity experts, security stakeholders and external scientific partners. You influence through expertise, clarity and good judgement, not authority or process.

Strong candidates may also have: