Georgia Lagoudas, PhD

I am a Senior Fellow at the Brown University Pandemic Center and a member of the faculty at the Brown School of Public Health. I lead the Clean Indoor Air Initiative to reduce disease transmission indoors and make the spaces where we spend 90% of our time healthier and safer. I work at the intersection of science, policy, and public health and coordinate with state and federal leaders to advance policies and actions to help us breathe easier. I recently launched a global initiative on healthy indoor air at the United Nations General Assembly in 2025 (see more at airclub.org). I’m trained as a professional communicator and mediator and have served in policy roles in both the Congressional and Executive Branches.

From 2021-2023, I served as Senior Advisor for Biotechnology and Bioeconomy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, I helped lead the drafting and implementation of an Executive Order on Advancing the American Bioeconomy, an effort to generate new jobs, expand domestic supply chains, and enhance our ability to manufacture products with the tools of biotechnology. I also launched a White House Clean Indoor Air Initiative to reduce respiratory disease transmisison, in collaboration with the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

I was previously a AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Policy Fellow working in Washington, D.C. as part of Senator Markey’s team on energy and the environment. I led the writing and introduction of 3 bills, including one that became law through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 (Bioeconomy Research and Development Act), advancing biotechnology research. I also served as a AAAS Science & Tech Policy Fellow in the U.S. Department of State working on international biological policy and the prevention of biological weapons.

Before coming to DC, I worked as a scientist in the DSM Innovation Center in Boston, leading an initiative to develop products to improve animal gut health. I performed microbiology expertiments, DNA sequencing, and microbiome data analysis with the goal to reduce the reliance on antibiotics for growth promotion in animals.

I completed my Ph.D. in Paul Blainey’s lab at MIT and the Broad Institute. I built microfluidic technologies to analyze microbial genomes, and I used DNA sequencing to study antibiotic resistance. I have experience in genomic sequencing, microfluidics, microbiology, and bioinformatics.

I have 5+ years of coaching and mentoring students, and I served as a Communication Fellow at MIT.

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Short bio:

Dr. Georgia Lagoudas is a Senior Fellow and faculty at the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health, where she brings extensive expertise in biosecurity, pandemic response, and indoor air quality. She leads the Clean Indoor Air Initiative at Brown University, advancing policy and implementation projects to improve indoor air quality and reduce disease transmission. Prior to this role, she served as Senior Advisor for Biotechnology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She led the drafting and implementation of the Executive Order on Advancing the American Bioeconomy and launched a White House Initiative to improve indoor air quality, helping to position clean indoor air as a core component of national health and resilience strategy. She coordinated the federal government’s effort to advance clean indoor air to reduce disease transmission during the COVID pandemic.

She previously worked at the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Senate as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. In the Senate, she led the writing and introduction of a bill that became law through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, advancing biotechnology research. Georgia completed her PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT.

A head shot can be downloaded here.