Try these Biosecurity Projects in your free time!

A list of biosecurity ideas for new independent researchers (including myself)!

By Afiq Hatta, Anu Bazarragchaa

Want to do impactful science in your free time, but unsure where to start? Unsure of a field to choose? You might want to have a look into the projects below, since biosecurity and pandemic prevention are impactful and neglected fields. Have a go!

The projects are ordered in rough priority from Afiq's perspective as an independent researcher! All ideas are free to take, and if you want help ping Afiq's discord or message on Substack. Before you begin, have a think about info-hazards and try not to do harm. Afiq takes responsibility for all views here, and they’re likely to change.

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Ventilation and Air Filtration

For those working on biosecurity part-time, indoor air quality topics in ventilation and purification seem to be good to work on. It lends itself to individual work, it's scalable, and already adoptable to the public via the commercial air purifier channel. Afiq is still wondering about the value of working on DIY as opposed to commercialisation strategy.

• Figuring out how to pressurise your house to cleanroom standards

  • Currently one of Afiq's active projects with Charles Victorio

  • There are known examples of this working in areas with wildfires.

• Engaging YouTubers on the importance of indoor air quality.

  • Afiq has 9k subs on his channel, 1k subscribers on Substack, and is figuring out how communicate these ideas better to diverse audiences.

• A tool that lets you measure Indoor Air Quality metrics before moving into a house.

• Reviews of indoor air quality products / aggregators like this. A clean dataset would be good to see, since it's still fuzzy on the right stuff to get.

• Find a way to make a quick and versatile window seal that has a hole for a fan.

  • A way to build something that we can easily retrofit into people's London houses.

• Clarifying the measurement tools that you need for cheap indoor air quality.

  • Which particle counters could someone buy? Why are they so expensive?

  • What are the metrics

• An 'everything you need to know' about ventilation and air filtration document

  • Efficacy, logistics, how it works, cost, scalability

• Better tools to make modelling ventilation a lot easier than it currently is

  • Like 'I take a picture of my house with its windows' -> what are my air changes per hour

  • Martin Bazant has a covid infection risk calculator

• Tools that tell you how strong your fans need to be in a room to be optimal

• Figuring out why the commercial market for air filters is so bad

• A document going into the logistics behind air filters

• Estimating how different a real ventilation measurement is versus a calculated version just using temperature and wind speeds.

• Study of the impact of different building materials on ventilation efficiency

• Investigation of natural ventilation strategies in different climate zones

• Development of smart ventilation systems that respond to occupancy and air quality

• Figuring out what London councils are doing about indoor air quality

  • What are the current programmes that London councils have on offer currently?

• DIY Projects

  • A guide on modifying your house to have sufficient ventilation in it

  • How to make DIY fans

  • How to make DIY air filters

  • How to DIY ventilation rates

  • Creating a DIY HVAC measurement tutorial - there are loads of these online but something biosecurity focused would be cool.

  • Do cheap CO2 monitors work as well as expensive CO2 monitors?

  • Modifying or creating cheap PAPRS like in this youtube video

Far UVC

Read Blueprint Biosecurity's blueprint! Afiq's been ping-ponging on how he could best contribute to this area and here are some ideas.

• Tools to make far UVC a lot easier to install in a real world setting.

  • Easier ways to rapidly measure a room and then optimise Far UVC light placement.

  • Investigation of the different performance of LIDAR apps in phones.

• Better pedagogy and explanations on how far UVC works.

  • Maybe something in the form in the form of a blog

• Better tools to simulate far UVC in ventilation chambers, so that we can replicate papers

• Better tools to do CFD quickly for a given room

• Figuring out what a heuristics document that could be distributed widely in a catastrophic scenario might look like

• For some reason people think that the blue light that appears in some hand dryers is bactericidal - and they seem to be ok with that, can that tell us anything about UVC adoption?

• Figuring out if far UVC was available - if people would trust it.

• Analysing the Far UVC supply chain

• Analysing the current food sterilisation supply chain

• Comp-chem investigation into wavelengths of light killing peptide bonds

• Development of smartphone apps to measure and monitor far UVC intensity in real-time

• Investigation of UVC's impact on different surface materials and their degradation

• Development of automated UVC scheduling systems

Stockpiling estimation

• How much square footage do all the public spaces in London take up?

• What data would be immediately meaningful to government in a crisis scenario?

• What data is required to estimate critical workers in the case of a crisis?

AI use

• Will we get to a point where AI can help people construct protection mechanisms in there homes without much effort

• How can we use AI to scan built environment literature

Drug discovery / AI x bio / computational chemistry

• Is AI actually accelerating drug discovery?

• What are actually the bottlenecks right now for the drug discovery industry?

  • Regulatory factors and all

• How fast, in principle, could we make a drug?

• Do we actually need machine learning for protein folding or are more / faster computers sufficient enough?

Elastomeric respirators

• My experience buying an elastomeric respirator

• Is there a way that I could make a PAPR or elastomeric respirator with stuff in my house?

• A document on how to fit test an elastomeric respirator

• A review into elastomeric respirators - does it work?

  • Efficacy, safety, supply chain

  • Scalability

  • How could we better communicate how to wear these properly?

• Where an elastomeric respirator might go wrong?

• A review on how we would distribute such respirators in an emergency situation

• Looking into an approved 'standard' for elastomeric respirators - would that kind of thing work?

• Development of 3D-printed adapters for different face shapes

• Study of long-term wear effects on different demographic groups

• Investigation of cleaning and maintenance protocols

• Development of child-sized versions

DNA

• AI x bio - not sure how I'd really help there considering how tricky AI safety already is

• A review of more secure frameworks for people ordering DNA (KYC and the like)

Anti-bacterial surfaces

• A more comprehensive review into research in anti-bacterial surfaces

  • Safety concerns about good bacteria / gut microbiome

• Study of natural antimicrobial materials from plants and animals

• Investigation of self-cleaning surface technologies

• Development of antimicrobial surface testing protocols

• Study of antimicrobial resistance development on treated surfaces

Vapours

• Glycol vapours - a deep dive

  • Safety, efficacy, scalability

• Investigation of essential oil vapours as antimicrobial agents

• Study of vaporized hydrogen peroxide systems

• Development of safe vapor concentration monitoring systems

• Investigation of vapor persistence in different environments

Forecasting

• A website that showcases historical forecasting model failures.

  • Figuring out what's 'hard' to do for those involved in the mathematical forecasting of diseases

• Figuring out what epidemiological packages in R should be migrated to a python package.

• Better tooling and pedagogy for the mathematical nuances in epidemiology forecasting

• A GIS dataset merged with virology datasets to track climate change and disease

• Better tooling and pedagogy for the mathematical nuances in epidemiology

• Building tools that might be useful to biosecurity forecasters

• Better documentation on how to do forecast well, avoiding standard errors

• Development of early warning systems for emerging pathogens

• Study of historical pandemic patterns and their predictive value

• Investigation of climate change impacts on disease spread

• Development of risk assessment tools for different biosecurity measures

Datasets

• Automated tools to build data APIs more easily

  • Building a data pipeline is annoying and hard!

  • There should be a way to automate this.

• Building an api for datasets relevant to biosecurity like

  • Aggregating all of the z values for far UVC

  • The costs of every biosecurity measure out there

  • The cost of every single air filter out there

    • An actual usable representation of the UK infrastructure database

• Compilation of historical biosecurity policy outcomes

Pedagogy

• Making a wiki for everything biosecurity

• Biosecurity book reviews and recommendations

• Some primers on physics topics applicable to biosecurity

  • Example sheets and physics primers for biosecurity could act as force multipliers

    • Could be sent to university students to make them realise that there are interesting technical problems out there

    • Also could be sent to built environment

• Development of biosecurity curriculum for different education levels

• Creation of interactive biosecurity training modules

• Creation of biosecurity case study collections

Info hazards

• Improving and developing the current info hazard guidance there is out there

  • A review of current papers out there on infohazards

• Is it safe to write things like 'this PPE mechanism might go wrong because...'

History of biosecurity

• Biosecurity measures pre the year 1000

• A history of every biosecurity policy that backfired

• How can we translate the nuclear

• Criticisms of current biosecurity policies in government

• A history of how and why people distrust pandemic prevention measures like vaccines

• Study of ancient quarantine practices

• Development of biosecurity policy evolution timeline

• Study of cultural differences in biosecurity practices

Infection rates and pedagogy

• How can we make the physics of infection clearer?

• Should we be pushing this to be taught in high schools / university as part of the standard physics or biology curricula?

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Acknowledgements

Afiq wrote the document. Anu provided major contributions to the forecasting section and we are currently working on developing this. Afiq takes responsibility for all ideas presented here and views represented are his own!

Thank you to Jacob Swett, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Vivian Belenky, Sofya Lebedeva, Damon Binder, James Wagstaff for discussions.