James Smith, PhD

James Smith, DPhil is an adjunct faculty at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and is the Executive Director of the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund. He works to better understand and address the risks of mirror life, and was part of the group that wrote a 2024 commentary in Science drawing attention to those risks. He has previously held positions at the Center for Long Term Resilience and at RAND Europe focused on biosecurity policy. Prior to this, he was the head of global strategy for Alvea, a vaccine company that completed a phase 1 clinical trial for an omicron targeted pDNA vaccine, where he led regulatory, quality, and aspects of product development.

Dr. Smith holds an undergraduate degree (biological sciences) and UK Medical Research Council funded doctoral degree (medical sciences) from the University of Oxford. He was also a postdoctoral scientist and senior postdoctoral scientist at the University of Oxford, in the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences and the Centre for Statistics in Medicine, a Fellow of Reproducible Research Oxford, and a SENS Research Foundation Scholar at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.