Jon Judd's work sits at the intersection of biotechnology governance, biosecurity policy, and equitable access to the life sciences. The common thread is a conviction that the governance frameworks shaping the bioeconomy need to treat security and equity as co-considerations from the start, not as constraints applied after the fact.

Biological Data Governance and the Bioeconomy

Federal biological datasets occupy an uncomfortable regulatory position. Open-access norms in science assume that sharing data accelerates discovery, and that is largely true. But biological data carries national security implications that pure openness cannot ignore: sequence data, biosynthetic pathway information, and genomic repositories can be exploited by adversarial actors in ways that other scientific data cannot. At the same time, overly restrictive access regimes create their own problems. They disadvantage researchers at under-resourced institutions and in lower-income countries, concentrate the benefits of biotech innovation among a small set of well-resourced actors, and slow the scientific collaboration that produces the most important advances.

The governance challenge is building frameworks that resolve this tension rather than simply choosing a side. My work focuses on managed access models: tiered governance structures that allow biological data access based on institutional verification, research purpose, and biosecurity risk profile. The managed access framework I developed at EBRC, published in 2026, proposes a concrete architecture for federal repositories. A Congressional briefing on this work is scheduled for June 2026, presenting the framework directly to members of the BioTech and Artificial Intelligence caucuses.

Dual-Use Research Oversight and International Biosecurity

Related Writing:

Data Standards and Interoperability for Biofoundry Infrastructure — under review | Global Capacity Building for Novel Gene-Editing Therapies: Challenges and Opportunities — MIT Science Policy Review, forthcoming August 2026

Gain-of-function research and dual-use research of concern sit at the sharpest edge of the tension between scientific progress and biosecurity. The science is often legitimate and important. The risk is also real: research that enhances pathogen transmissibility or virulence carries potential for catastrophic misuse. What makes governance here especially difficult is the international dimension. Current oversight frameworks vary significantly across jurisdictions, leaving gaps that no single country can close unilaterally. A researcher in one country may conduct work that would face meaningful oversight in another, with no binding international mechanism to address the difference.

My work on this thread focuses on what practical alignment looks like across that variation. At EBRC, I produced a gain-of-function oversight policy analysis for the U.S. State Department assessing governance gaps and alignment challenges across jurisdictions. I then convened six international listening sessions engaging government officials, policy researchers, biosafety professionals, and research scientists from approximately 18 countries across five regions: the Americas, Africa, Europe, East Asia, and the Indo-Pacific. Those sessions generated direct practitioner input on where current BWC-aligned standards fail in practice and where international convergence is most achievable. A public-facing policy framework synthesizing that input is in development.

Roles & Affiliations

Postdoctoral Scholar, Engineering Biology Research Consortium, November 2025 — present

Committee Member, American Society of Human Genetics Government and Public Advocacy Committee, 2023 — 2025