Blackjack, Biosecurity and Big Bets | Alexander Titus, National Biotech Commissioner
About this episode
Alexander Titus discusses his unconventional career path and insights on biotechnology and national security.
In this episode, we sit down with Alexander Titus—computational biologist, founder of the In Vivo Group, Head of AI at Avidity Biosciences, and commissioner on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. From backpacking through Central America on a one-way ticket to becoming the first-ever biotech director at the U.S. Department of Defense, Titus has built a career around a simple ethos: do hard things with good people and have fun along the way. Titus shares how a last-minute decision to move to the Bay Area, a spontaneous detour to Cuba, and a months-long bike ride from the Arctic Ocean to San Francisco all shaped his appetite for risk, resilience, and unconventional career moves. He talks about living in a Detroit casino while his wife worked night shifts at a children’s hospital—and how using a $100 blackjack bankroll with strict downside protection became both a crash course in probability and an unexpected asset in his grad school interviews. We dig into his work at the Pentagon, where he helped stand up biotech as a serious national security priority, and his current role on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, which recently…
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