Agnostic Solutions for Characterizing and Mitigating Chemical and Biological Threats

This year, the elected team has chosen to take a holistic approach to chem-bio defense and engage in building an integrated community with shared knowledge and capabilities to address pressing challenges more effectively. This year’s conference will focus on addressing challenges and opportunities associated with chem/bio-preparedness; the ability to prevent, identify, and counter emerging and unanticipated threats. The vision this year is to integrate science around the current administration’s executive orders (biomanufacturing, AI/ML, Chem-Bio threats, and pandemic preparedness) to build holistic solutions for emerging threats. Creating awareness, building a new generation of diverse leaders, promoting multi-disciplinary science to drive towards real world applications, and addressing responsible use of disruptive technologies are key drivers for this year’s event. This conference uniquely enables chem-bio defense challenges to be discussed in one forum, providing an exceptional community where out-of-the-box solutions can be fostered. The primary foci for the conference are agnostic methods for identification, characterization, and diagnosis/detection of new/emerging threats. This year, we are assembling communities to engage on known/emerging technologies of agnostic sensing and enabling science (data science methods, engineering) that can truly elicit responsiveness to emerging threats. The goal is to build a diverse community to explore this field and enable new connections/opportunities to avail of the power of disruptive technologies in addressing chem/bio preparedness. There has been an unprecedented boom in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in biological sciences. Yet, questions on reliable, reproducible and safe use of such methods remain, and will form the chassis for discussions. Transformative academics, federal and industry leaders, National Laboratories, and other science stakeholders from various disciplines will be key players in this year’s program.