Edward You is a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Biological Countermeasures Unit.  Mr. You is responsible for creating programs and activities to coordinate and improve FBI and interagency activities to identify, assess, and respond to biological threats or incidents.  He manages FBI initiatives to build partnerships with the life sciences community, domestically and internationally, and leads efforts to identify and address potential security challenges in emerging biotechnology, such as synthetic biology and the use of big data. His overall goal is to safeguard the scientific community, the life science research enterprise, and the bio-economy.  Before being promoted to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Mr. You was a member of the FBI Los Angeles Field Office Joint Terrorism Task Force and served on the FBI Hazardous Evidence Response Team.

Mr. You has also been directly involved in policy-making efforts with a focus on biosecurity.  He served as an active Working Group member of the National Security Council Policy Coordinating Committee on Countering Biological Threats and is currently the Ex Officio member of the National Institutes of Health National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.  He also served on two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committees, the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Microbial Threats and the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law’s Forum on Synthetic Biology.

Prior to joining the FBI, Mr. You worked for six years in graduate research focusing on retrovirology and human gene therapy at the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine.  He subsequently worked for three years at the biotechnology firm AMGEN Inc. in cancer research.