Founded in Spring 2023, the Wisconsin Biosecurity Initative aspires to serve as an incubator for high-impact careers promoting and facilitating the development of skills relevant to biosecurity.
Meet our team here, and see our newly refined program here.
The Wisconsin Biosecurity Initiative (WBI) is an interdisciplinary group that brings students together to mitigate the increasingly prevalent threat posed by infectious disease.
As evident by the historic COVID-19 pandemic, infectious diseases have the capacity to shut down societies: interrupting critical supply chains, destabilizing economies, and leading to massive loss of life.
While the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic has fallen considerably from its peak, additional, potentially even more lethal pandemics may be just around the corner - waiting to spill over from a non-human host, being stored in an insecure laboratory, or perhaps being created using increasingly available genetic engineering tools.
To prevent these pathogens from triggering the next global pandemic , experts in epidemiology, public health, biology, environmental science, medicine, law, and numerous other fields must collaborate closely to surveil pathogens, effectively manage outbreaks, develop vaccines, and respond promptly to emerging threats.
Helping students get their start in these fields is the core of the Wisconsin Biosecurity Initiative which offers mentored research and project teams, a vast professional network, as well as internship, publishing and grant opportunities – our goal is to kickstart your career!
If any (or all) of these opportunites sound interesting to you, please reach out! We'd love to hear from you.