In this collaborative research endeavor at the intersection of biological safety and cybersecurity for BiosView labs, the authors highlight their engagement with a diverse student cohort. The chapter delves into the motivation behind collaborations extending beyond traditional academic research environments, emphasizing inclusivity. The meticulous examination of student demographics, including gender, self-reported ethnicity, and national origin, is detailed in the methodology. A student-centric approach is central to the exploration, focusing on aligning teaching and management styles with unique student needs. The chapter elaborates on effective teaching methodologies and management practices tailored for BiosView labs. A dedicated section emphasizes the purpose of joint endeavors, featuring a thoughtfully crafted questionnaire that guides collaborations towards both educational and personally meaningful outcomes for students.
TopIntroduction
Agriculture, bioenergy, pharmaceuticals, industrial biomaterials, and more – items that are fundamental to sustaining humanity comprise the economic subjects that researchers call the Bioeconomy. Since the end of the 20th century, societies have witnessed an increasing convergence of digital interfacing with the bioeconomy for improved processing, logistics, and commerce of biological products (Murch, So, Buchholz, Raman, & Peccoud, 2018). This was fantastic for both consumers and providers, as the benefits of digitization and digital interfacing begat many new and innovative features for both parties. There was the creation of better means to monitor the quality of products, track, interact, and trade them. Faster speeds or deeper resolutions would become available. However, with increasing digitization and digital interfacing of elements of the bioeconomy comes the increasing vulnerability of said systems to malicious agents operating on digital platforms to cyber-attacks (Potter & Palmer, Human factors in biocybersecurity wargames, 2021; Murch & DiEuliis, 2019). Realizations of this are apparent through growing attacks on bioeconomic supply chains and researchers provide demos of additional problematic bases that could potentially occur.
Contemplation of cybersecurity cases involving the bioeconomy having their own, hybrid section has deeply prompted considerable discussion and debate. Further, as links of chains in biological cyberattacks became more realistic, these discussions intensified resulting in the terms “Cyberbiosecurity” and “Biocybersecurity,” and hyphenated alternative versions, appearing in literature within the 2010s. The initial works trickled in, and the field would see publication titles bearing the aforementioned names towards the late 2010s, with the first recognized paper being release in 2017 (Peccoud, Gallegos, Murch, Buchholz, & Raman, 2017; Murch, So, Buchholz, Raman, & Peccoud, 2018).
A key practical work to show that a hybrid field was necessary versus couching concerns of biosecurity concerns within the domain of all current cybersecurity practitioners would be helpful. A pivotal work among several that changed this, became just that, “Computer Security, Privacy, and DNA Sequencing: Compromising Computers with Synthesized DNA, Privacy Leaks, and More” by Ney et al, 2017, energized plenty in the research community in showing that biological materials could be a meaningful interlock in cybersecurity attacks, among other findings through demonstration of DNA, a biomaterial, being useful for execution of a remote cyber-attack (Ney, Koscher, Organick, Ceze, & Tadayoshi Kohno, 2017).