Jake is the founder and Executive Director of Blueprint Biosecurity, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening society’s ability to prepare for and respond to pandemics. He founded Blueprint after leading The Apollo Program for Biodefense, a report published in the wake of COVID-19 by the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. The report laid out an ambitious plan for overhauling America's layers of defense against pandemics, and Blueprint was created to continue advancing that work.
Before Blueprint, Jake co-founded altLabs, a research nonprofit focused on biosecurity solutions, and served as CTO at an early-stage startup developing biosensors that integrate semiconductor electronics with synthetic biology. Earlier in his career, he worked as a research scientist at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, where he focused on nanotechnology and biomedical applications.
Jake has contributed to more than 70 scientific articles and patents, authored op-eds in The New York Times and STAT, and currently serves as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Progress and as an advisor to Intercept, a philanthropic initiative that aims to radically reduce the burden of respiratory infections, and eventually eliminate them altogether. He holds a Ph.D. in nanotechnology from the University of Oxford and has bachelor’s degrees in physics and applied mathematics.
