AIxBio Africa is looking for a volunteer Director of Research (AI safety and biosecurity)

Hi everyone,

I'm the founder of AIxBio Africa, a research and capacity building organization working at the intersection of AI safety, biology, and biosecurity, with a particular focus on African contexts.

We're looking for a Director of Research to help lead our research activities.

I wanted to share this here because our work overlaps with some of the questions discussed in the AI safety community, especially around evaluating safeguards against AI enabled biological misuse.

What we're working on

One of the questions we're interested in is whether AI safety safeguards work consistently across languages.

Many evaluations of frontier AI systems are conducted primarily in English. We think it's worth investigating whether the same safety behavior will still hold across other languages, including our African languages, and how differences should be interpreted.

There are several methodological challenges here. For example, how do we ensure that prompts have equivalent meaning across languages? How do we distinguish actual differences in safety behavior from something that might be a translation problems? And how should we evaluate potentially sensitive biological risk scenarios without unnecessarily increasing misuse risks across models. Basically creating the proble we set out to fix initially?

What we've done so far

We recently completed our first research fellowship. Four fellows completed the program and produced four public research outputs with support from mentors working across technical AI, policy, and governance. These were the three tracks we measured

The pilot helped us identify where we need stronger research supervision and other research specific needs

We're now developing a more structured research program, with multilingual safety evaluation as an important focus.

You can learn more about our work at aixbioafrica.org.

The role

We're looking for someone who can take responsibility for the scientific quality and direction of our research.

The Director of Research would work closely with me and our research collaborators to Help define research questions and decide which projects are worth pursuing and develop and review research methodologies, particularly for AI safety and biologicalrisk evaluations.

We're especially interested in someone who has experience conducting or supervising research and who can critically assess whether a study's methods actually support its conclusions.

Relevant backgrounds could include AI safety evaluations, machine learning, biosecurity, biological risk assessment, computational biology, or related fields.

A note about the position

AIxBio Africa is still an early stage organization, and our team has largely been working on a volunteer basis.

This is currently a remote, volunteer role with flexible, part-time involvement.

We're also still developing our research infrastructure and processes. The person joining us would need to be comfortable helping build those structures rather than joining an already established research department.

I think that distinction is important for anyone considering the role.

How to apply

You can apply through our Director of Research application form.

You can also visit our team page for more information about the organization.

I'm happy to answer questions about the research direction, the organization, or the responsibilities of the role in the comments.

If you know a researcher who might be a good fit, I'd appreciate you sharing the opportunity with them.

Fatika
Founder and Executive Director, AIxBio Africa