Johan Täng

Meet Johan

Johan grew up in a sleepy small town in Småland where academic ambitions were not that common. Despite that, he went to study medicine at Karolinska Institute and in 2024 finished his medical internship (Swedish AT). He now works towards specialization in infectious diseases at the University Hospital in Linköping, aiming to learn how we can best eliminate the worst pathogens and prevent new ones from threatening public health. 

Finding EA and founding a Biosecurity network 

Johan found GiveWell and 80,000 hours some years ago, but didn’t start engaging with the ideas and community until 2022. He had previously dipped my toes into global health, climate and nuclear disarmament, and felt right at home finding other smart, kind people engaging with these important problems. Considering what problems that seem most pressing to work on, along with his personal fit, Johan started to engage in biosecurity,  where his medical background and interest in infectious diseases can be leveraged. Through EA Sweden’s career coaching, Johan was put in touch with another EA Sweden coachee, who became both a dear friend and his co-founder of the Nordic Biosecurity Group (NBG). The idea to start NBG came out of the EAGxNordics 2023 conference, where there was not a single event focused on biosecurity. Since then, Johan has, with support of EA Sweden, networked and started to build a group and platform for EAs and other people interested in biosecurity in the Nordics. 

Why Johan think Biosecurity is a pressing problem 

The public and political attention to biological threats, like pandemics, follows a cycle of panic and neglect. So now when we are re-entering the neglect phase, we very much need ambitious people to keep working on preventing and preparing better for future pandemics. Especially since they could be a lot worse than COVID-19, where spillover from animals (like bird flu), laboratory leaks (unpleasantly common) or even deliberately enhanced/engineered pathogens designed to be more destructive all pose serious, ongoing, threats to public health and humanity's well-being. These risks are worsened by the effects of climate change and by biotechnological and AI development which may lower the bar for creating designed pathogens as biological weapons. However, all these threats have tractable solutions from both policy and technical development, making it a problem that we have clear ways of mitigating.

My advice for other interested

First I'd like to highlight that many people with non-medical backgrounds have a great chance of contributing to biosecurity solutions. This includes, but is not limited to people with backgrounds or strong skills in engineering, product design, economics, computer science, statistics, communication and policy. So, if biosecurity seems like a good personal fit, two good places to start are the 80,000 hours podcast and website content as well as BlueDot Impact's Biosecurity Fundamentals course. I'd also be happy to chat and introduce you to the NBG community and other resources and opportunities that would be relevant to you.