Edward Hammond is a researcher active on policy issues related to laboratory biosafety, biodiversity, infectious disease, biodiversity, and intellectual property. He has been a member of United Nations expert groups on synthetic biology, digital sequence information, and agricultural genetic resources, has actively participated in implementation of the WHO Framework on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness, and was the director of the Sunshine Project, which investigated policies and practices of US Institutional Biosafety Committees. He was a founding member of the Cambridge Working Group, which was founded in 2014 to advocate for strengthened oversight of gain-of-function research, and which helped bring about the US pause in federal funding of selected gain-of-function research in 2014-2017.