Course Acknowledgements (July 2025 Iteration) and Substack Launch
Thank you to everyone who made this iteration of the course happen!
Introduction
We ran the initial online version of the Introduction to Biosecurity course between 7th July and 3rd August 2025.
This post acknowledges everyone who made this course happen, including the facilitators, community managers, application reviewers, user testers and experts who gave feedback.
We thank the following people for their help with the course. Note that within each section, apart from the core team, people have been listed in alphabetical order by surname, and their LinkedIn is linked if they included it when giving consent to be acknowledged.
Core Team
The core team were the main organisers of the course, including developing and iterating the course content, finalising the course cohort, running the operations, creating resources and evaluating overall impact.
Course Lead: Lin Bowker-Lonnecker
Course Design and Development: Zoheb Anjum
Course Operations: Golnoosh Sharifan
Course Facilitators and Coordinators
Beyond the core team, three groups of people helped with the running of the course.
Facilitators
Each week of the course included a 1.5-hour facilitated discussion session.
With thanks to the following people for facilitating:
Community Managers
The community managers’ role was to improve participant experience, for example running networking events or sharing relevant biosecurity news.
With thanks to the following people for being community managers:
Application Reviewers
With thanks to the following people for reviewing applications:
More details about how application review was completed will be given in a future post.
Course Input and Feedback
To develop and finalise the syllabus, we got input from experts in biosecurity (including others working on capacity building), as well as doing user testing of the syllabus and of session activities.
Expert Input
With thanks to the following people who gave input on the course focus, syllabus and/or activity creation, including expert responses to one of the activities:
Ryan Duncombe
Gregory Lewis
3 anonymous people
More details about how expert input was obtained will be given in a future post.
User Testing
With thanks to the following people for giving user testing feedback on a section of the syllabus and/or on session activities:
2 anonymous people
More details about how user testing was done will be given in a future post.
Substack Launch
Thank you again to everyone who made this version of the course happen.
In this Substack, we will post resources, retrospectives and other writings. We hope for people to use these to run their own versions of this course, and to develop their own courses or other programmes in biosecurity or other high impact areas.
In our next post, we will summarise what resources we will post over the next several months.