Senior Researcher, Civil Safety Sciences

Job Summary

AI is compressing the timelines on which genuinely novel threats emerge, opening hazard classes that fall outside the established CBRN-and-cyber playbooks that governments are organizing themselves to address. The most consequential risks may be ones for which no detection apparatus, response doctrine, or scientific community yet exists.

CARMA's Civil Safety Sciences program advances the detection sciences, response protocols, and resilience technologies that let people, communities, and the biosphere better foresee, curtail, endure, and recover from civilizational shocks. In this role, you'll help shape that portfolio: anticipating novel hazard classes, advancing next-generation detection and resilience approaches, identifying safety technologies whose earlier maturation shifts the offense-defense balance, and weaving the scientific coordination that lets dispersed researchers function as a coherent field. You'll work under the direction of the Executive Director while running projects with significant intellectual autonomy.

This position is 100% remote but requires occasional travel, including periodic visits to laboratories and research groups for technical discussions and demonstrations.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct structured horizon-scanning for novel AI-enabled hazard classes, and develop methodologies for reasoning rigorously about threats that lack historical base rates or established scientific communities
• Investigate next-generation detection sciences, such as dynamic and adaptive pathogen surveillance, and analogous open-ended approaches for other emerging hazard modalities
• Pursue feasibility analyses on deep resilience and lifeline capacities engineered to function when conventional infrastructure, sunlight, or centralized coordination cannot be assumed
• Analyze biosphere-scale vulnerabilities, including geoengineering, synthetic microbes for terraforming or remediation, and nontraditional environmental toxicology arising from AI-enabled activity
• Identify and selectively advance defensive, stabilizing, and transparency-enhancing technologies whose differential acceleration favors humanity
• Develop scientific metaresearch on how evidence is generated, aggregated, and translated into action where conventional empirical feedback loops are weak
• Build scientific coordination capacity through standards, convenings, and cross-border working relationships, and equip frontline responders and community networks with usable decision support
• Co-author grant applications, build analytical tools that make catastrophic risks more legible, and translate findings for policymakers, technical audiences, and the public
• Collaborate across CARMA programs to integrate civil safety perspectives with broader risk assessment, governance, and technical safety workstreams

Required Qualifications

• Advanced degree (PhD or >1 MS preferred) in a hard-science or engineering discipline, with demonstrated breadth across multiple natural science fields. Strong candidates may come from any of, or combinations across: biosecurity, microbiology, ecology, environmental or atmospheric science, agricultural and food systems science, chemistry, materials science, physics, public health, biomedical or systems engineering, resilience engineering, security sciences, or related fields
• Substantive familiarity with adversarial environments and adversarial reasoning, broadly construed: grounded in security studies, biosecurity, cybersecurity, defense analysis, red-teaming, safety engineering, dual-use technology assessment, or comparable experience reasoning rigorously about deliberate misuse and worst-case dynamics
• Demonstrated ability to reason carefully about hazards that lack robust historical data or settled detection paradigms
• 5+ years of relevant research or applied experience, with a track record of running independent projects from framing through delivery
• Strong publication record or equivalent body of work on technological risk, resilience, detection science, or related domains
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with proven ability to translate technical content for policymakers, funders, and non-specialist audiences
• Systems thinking and comfort with substantial uncertainty and rapidly shifting knowledge landscapes
• Substantive grounding in modern AI capabilities and trajectories, sufficient to anticipate how advancing AI reshapes threat and defense landscapes in your areas of work
• Self-directed, with sound judgment for identifying high-leverage problems under broad rather than micromanaged direction

Pluses

• Interdisciplinary credentials bridging two or more of: biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, computer science, ecology, or public health
• Direct experience in biosurveillance, civil defense or emergency preparedness, food security, environmental monitoring, geoengineering analysis, biosafety, or critical infrastructure protection
• Background in scientific metaresearch, evidence synthesis, horizon scanning, structured expert elicitation, or foresight methodologies
• Experience with grant writing, science diplomacy, standards development, or convening dispersed research communities
• Skills in tool building, modeling, or dashboard development for risk visualization and decision support
• Track record of contributions to AI safety, AI governance, biosecurity policy, or adjacent fields
• Familiarity with cognitive and epistemic security, or experience working with frontline responders, mutual aid networks, or community-level resilience capacity