Chris Chung

Chris (Ngai Lam) Chung is a non-resident fellow at  at UNIDIR’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. He is currently a technical fellow for the Sequence Biosecurity Risk Consortium at the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science. His expertise lies at the intersection of the life sciences and biological weapons non-proliferation, with a particular interest in DNA synthesis screening and how advances in AI-enabled biology bear on wider biosecurity governance.

Chris’ work draws on a background in structural biology and biochemistry, applying computational methods to questions of biological risk and dual-use governance. Prior to joining UNIDIR, Chris served as a Research Fellow at Fourth Eon Biosecurity. His work there included developing a benchmark for sequence-to-function prediction methods on far-from-nature proteins and fine-tuning a language model for framework-agnostic scoring of functional annotations. His research serves as a foundation for developing robust function-based screening of DNA synthesis orders and aided the company in becoming one of the inaugural collaborators in OpenAI’s GPT-Rosalind for Biodefense program.

Chris recently successfully defended his DPhil in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, specialising in structural biology, protein dynamics and influenza virology. His doctoral studies were funded in full by the Croucher Scholarship for Doctoral Study and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Graduate Scholarship. He also holds an MSc by Research from the University of Oxford and a BSc from Imperial College London, having relocated from Hong Kong for his studies. Chris is fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.