James Diggans is a Distinguished Scientist, Bioinformatics and Biosecurity, at Twist Bioscience, a DNA synthesis company based outside of San Francisco and is the current Chair of the International Gene Synthesis Consortium. He holds a PhD from George Mason University in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and has worked in target discovery, molecular diagnostic development and biodefense. At Twist, he created and leads the company's biosecurity program, is a member of the government affairs and policy team and leads bioinformatics in the Advanced Development group on work including the storage of digital data in DNA.