Michael Patterson

Dr. Michael Patterson ) joined the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as a Program Manager in March of 2021. He specializes in identifying challenges unique to the intelligence community and defense industry which can be addressed through research and development from a biological sciences perspective. Dr. Patterson’s main interests align with advancing biodefense, biosecurity, countering WMDs, synthetic biology, and multi-omics. Dr. Patterson leads, as of Oct 2021, the Proteos and TEI-REX programs along with two smaller research projects associated with breath-based detection of infectious diseases and pathogen-agnostic surveillance efforts. Additionally, he has led or supported research efforts touching on microelectronics, threat detection of biologicals through bioinformatics and experimental assay (IARPA’s Fun GCAT program), advanced mass spectrometry for single isotope detection, multi-modal sensors (IARPA’s MOSAIC program), and detection of engineered organisms (IARPA’s FELIX program). Prior to his time at IARPA, he supported the Cooperative Biological Threat Reduction program at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency working predominately out of CENTCOM. Dr. Patterson holds a PhD in Experimental Pathology and an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Texas Medical Branch where his research focused on molecular virology and development of reverse genetics systems while working in biosafety level 3 and 4 environments. He received a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology from Whitman College.