Dr. Megan J. Palmer is an expert and leader in strategies to shape the responsible development of critical and emerging technologies with a focus on biotechnology. She currently serves as the Senior Advisor to the Director for National Security and Technology Strategy at the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). In this role she advises agency leadership on how to promote and protect leadership in health-relevant science and technology, including strategic positioning of national security and competitiveness, responsible innovation in program design and implementation of research security, biosecurity and related policy requirements. Previously, she served as the agency’s inaugural Lead for Responsible Innovation, leading initiatives to ensure the agency’s investments in breakthrough health innovations aligned with public interests, and coordinated input to interagency policy development.

Previously Dr. Palmer served as Senior Director of Public Impact at Ginkgo Bioworks where she led translation of the company’s commitment to care how their platform for synthetic biology and biosecurity was used into an operational strategy. She concurrently served as the staff designee to the chair of the U.S. National Security Committee for Emerging Biotechnology where she helped develop recommendations for advancing U.S. leadership in biotechnology. Dr. Palmer also held multiple roles at Stanford University, including founder and director of the Bio Policy & Leadership in Society (Bio.Polis) Initiative. She also led biosecurity initiatives at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford, where she was a Senior Research Scholar and William J. Perry Fellow in International Security. In these roles, and as an adjunct professor in Department of Bioengineering, she led interdisciplinary research on the conception and management of security as technologies become accessible, and led programs on guiding innovation to serve public interests.  

Dr. Palmer has led and advised many other organizations across public and private sectors. Among these roles, she co-chaired the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology and now serves on the Global Future Council for Generative Biology. For a decade she led social responsibility programs for the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition and she served on the iGEM Foundation’s board of directors. She also served as Deputy Director of Policy and Practices for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Synberc), and served on the board of directors of Revive & Restore.

Dr. Palmer received her Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from M.I.T. and a B.Sc.E. in Engineering Chemistry from Queen’s University, Canada.

Current Positions (also on linkedin)



Past Positions (also on linkedin)