Elika’s father was employed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and she grew up moving from country to country for his work. Elika started working on global health from a young age: at sixteen, she worked for the CDC on hand hygiene, malaria prevention, and post-Ebola triage systems in Sierra Leone. After completing her undergraduate degree in 2021, she managed 30 COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites that conducted over 100,000 tests per week for the Minnesota Department of Health.

Elika first encountered effective altruism and 80,000 Hours in 2018. She already felt aligned with many of the ideas of effective altruism, but she was drawn in by feeling like she had found a community which shared her mission to have an impact. Since 2018, she has volunteered as a facilitator for EA Virtual Programs; helped organise the EAGxBerkeley conference; and found some of our own resources helpful, like our podcast and career planning template.

In late 2021, Elika was applying to various graduate degree programs in global health and medicine. But through her engagement with 80,000 Hours and the effective altruism community, and a call with one of our advisors, she realised that she could have more impact in a related field: biosecurity.

Elika began applying for roles in biosecurity. She received two offers at about the same time: one to join the National Institutes of Health as a Bioethics Fellow, and another to focus her career on global health by studying Health Metrics and Implementation at UW Washington.

Elika reached out to our advising team to discuss her options, and which would most increase the impact of her career. While the graduate program would put her on a path to working on evidence-backed global health interventions, she decided to take the NIH offer to work on biosecurity based on two key factors: neglectedness and replaceability. Because biosecurity — which includes work on preventing catastrophic pandemics — is much more neglected than improving global health, she’d likely have more impact and be less replaceable in the bioethics role at the NIH.

Today, Elika is a Fellow in the NIH’s Department of Bioethics. She conducts desk research on biosecurity and clinical research ethics. Her research in biosecurity includes ethics and oversight (covering dual-use risks, risk-mapping work, ethics issues, and stakeholder engagement) and emerging technologies (such as how generative AI models are changing biological risks).

She is also multiplying her impact by helping communicate about global catastrophic risks. She co-organises lectures on topics in national security, AI, and biosecurity policy for the Network on Emerging Threats — a US policy network aiming to address emerging threats to national security like catastrophic biological risks, the dangers of artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and great power competition.