Christopher Aston, PhD, CBSP (ABSA)

Roles and Responsibilities

As the Chief Biological Safety Officer, Chris is responsible for supporting the University's comprehensive biological safety program at all sites including Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), Morningside Heights (MH), Manhattanville (MHV), Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and Nevis Campuses, and affiliate organizations. Chris supports a proactive biological safety program in a complex research environment, serving as the University's Chief Biological Safety Officer and a key member of the Biological Safety Team. Chris provides scientific leadership, institutional biosafety strategy, complex risk assessments, and specialized subject matter expertise while collaborating across EH&S programs and the research community to address the University's evolving technical and regulatory needs.

Biography

Growing up in the United Kingdom, Chris was interested from an early age in infectious diseases and the germs that cause them. He received his bachelor’s degree in immunobiology from the University of Wales and his D.Phil. (Ph.D.) from the University of Oxford in molecular and cellular biology, during which time he spent two years as an exchange student at the Rockefeller University. Prior to becoming a safety professional, he was a Principal Investigator at NYU Medical Center, and then at NYU Department of Chemistry. He led a transcriptional profiling team at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Research in Princeton, and was a CLEP and ELAP-accredited lab director at the New York City Department of Health’s Biothreat Response Laboratory. Prior to joining Columbia, he held a biosafety position at Weill Cornell Medical College.