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20 Years of Academic Excellence
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Thu, 09/05/2024 – 14:31

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Centers of Excellence (COE) are a true testament to the power of partnership. Managed by the Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) Office of University Programs, each COE is a coalition led by a U.S. college or university that matches the nation’s preeminent scholars and brightest students with resources across the private sector, national laboratories, federally funded research and development centers, state, local, tribal, and territorial homeland security agencies, and first responder groups. The result: groundbreaking research, technologies, and solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

In celebration of two decades of breakthroughs in terrorism prevention, cybersecurity, food security, community resilience, climate change, and much, much more, S&T gathered testimonials and research and development highlights that demonstrate the impact of the COEs on our national security.


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9/11 seemed like an ordinary day, until I received a call from my wife, already on her way to work. Airplanes had hit the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Surely, thousands had lost their lives. In the aftermath, I felt the calling to engage my university, the University of Southern California, toward homeland security. In 2003, Detlef von Winterfield and I led a proposal to establish the first DHS University COE, called the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE). We built CREATE on the idea that creative energies of faculty and students could make the nation safer, leveraging the entrepreneurial and adaptive startup culture that DHS enabled. 20 years later, CREATE still exists. We are grateful that the homeland has not experienced another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11. Yet we have not escaped the horror of terrorism. We mourn Hal Bowman, one of CREATE’s first employees and a victim of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack. Remembering Hal and other victims, CREATE continues in our mission to protect against threats to human livelihood through integrated and objective analysis of risks, costs and consequences of terrorism and other catastrophic threats confronting the United States.

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The DHS COE program serves as a critical bridge between innovative academic research and impactful applications in the public sector. As a doctoral student at Purdue University, I conducted research in the Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments, or VACCINE, COE. One of our team’s noteworthy projects was a collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard geared toward enhancing operations across the Great Lakes. We combined the Coast Guard’s operational knowledge with our team’s expertise in data visualization. The resulting toolkit was used to brief Congress on staffing needs, the effects of station closures, and ways to improve emergency response times. Our team received a meritorious commendation for our efforts, but I also observed that my research could have real-world impact—and that the incredibly rewarding project would not have been possible without the COE and its partners.

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Later, as I built my faculty career at
Arizona State University, I sought to lead a COE to ensure that students and fellow researchers have the opportunity to maximize the value of their work. The Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency continues the COE mission, has been awarded multiple patents and has created a variety of novel products deployed by DHS.

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We at the Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases (CEEZAD), an emeritus COE, took seriously our mission to protect the nation’s agriculture and public health sectors against high-consequence foreign animal, emerging, and/or zoonotic disease threats. Our research, technological development and training have all been directed toward this purpose.

One of the most important challenges involved enhancing the ability of the scientific community to counteract the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. CEEZAD research increased scientific understanding of how the virus replicates, how it spreads, its lifespan on various surfaces, and the susceptibility of various animal species including insects. Our scientists published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles detailing their research findings on SARS-CoV-2.

Beyond that, CEEZAD developed substantial research and development expertise in detection and countermeasure technologies for high-priority diseases including Foot and Mouth Disease, Avian Influenza, and African Swine Fever. CEEZAD developed novel vaccine candidates and diagnostic technologies and aggressively pursued integrated programs to train the next generation of foreign animal, emerging, and zoonotic disease professionals.

It is no exaggeration to say that much of the credit for the advancements we have been able to achieve accrues to our partnership with DHS as a COE. That partnership has—through financial backing, intellectual support, and collaborative commitment—yielded gains in the protection of both the public and the American economy that would have been far more difficult to achieve acting independently. It has been both a pleasure and a privilege to be able to work cooperatively with DHS to protect U.S. agricultural systems and public health.

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When S&T celebrated its 10th anniversary, I had recently joined the Arctic Domain Awareness Center (ADAC), an emeritus COE, as a faculty researcher. A decade later, I am proud to remain a part of the S&T family and help them celebrate 20 years of service.

ADAC was the first COE to look out onto the Arctic horizon. DHS tasked ADAC with exploring the maritime Arctic to provide research and scientific products to support the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). Throughout its tenure, ADAC provided USCG with solutions for the increasing challenge of maritime security and valuable insight into the rapidly changing Arctic.

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ADAC’s success is a testament to the power of collaboration. In partnership with DHS, ADAC worked tirelessly to study ways to mitigate potential threats, foster new relationships, and provide unprecedented access to the Arctic for university researchers and students as well as the homeland security workforce. It is with this foundational expertise that the University of Alaska Anchorage was awarded a new center of excellence, ADAC-ARCTIC, in 2024 with sights on the expanding threats on the northernmost horizon.

I am deeply grateful for the support and partnership of S&T. From the perspectives of a researcher, principal investigator, and now a university leadership position, I can see the impact S&T has made and will make investing in centers like ADAC and ADAC-ARCTIC. S&T’s continued focus on the Arctic is a commitment to America’s most geographically complex operational theater. Lastly, I am honored to support DHS in showing the power of universities to drive technological innovation and knowledge transfer for the safety and security of our homeland. 

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I have had the privilege and honor of being part of the DHS Student Research Team (SRT) program for the last 5 years. My students, Cecilia Torres, Xandra Bailey, Lilianna Mauldin, Jacob Howell, Heather Murray, Leander Murphy, Grace Mesarch, Enrique Martinez, Haily Gonzalez, Gabrielle Duran-Martinez, Victor Gonzalez and I were fortunate enough to have been chosen by the Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center (CINA) at George Mason University (GMU) to work on several projects examining transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).

The DHS COEs have been vital to the careers of my students and myself—our mentors and colleagues became like family to us. Working with CINA helped us build our networking opportunities and provided us with once-in-a-lifetime experiences, such as attending lectures from DHS personnel; visiting TSA facilities; GMU’s body farm; and collecting and analyzing data and presenting our findings in a professional environment to DHS leaders/personnel and other academics. It provided us with the opportunity to work with various experts on issues like the impact of COVID-19 on TCOs and study how cartels, gangs, and the media use social media and blogs to discuss criminal activities. My team was able to take the findings from two of our projects to write a chapter for my book, Mexico’s Drug-Related Violence.

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Enrique Martinez, Omar Camarillo (center), and Hailey Gonzalez at the DHS COE Showcase at the CINA 2024 Annual Meeting in Arlington, VA. Photo credit: Omar Camarillo/ENMU.

Working in partnership with the COEs has provided my students and I with a look at how we can use our research skills to help further the DHS mission by securing and managing U.S. borders, providing much-needed comparison between regional and national information on the impact of the pandemic on TCOs (information that might be overlooked by bigger media outlets), and charting out the actual fluctuations in criminal activity before and during the pandemic. I have taken what I learned from my time with CINA to demonstrate and teach my students in my courses how to analyze media and alternative forms of media for themes, data, and how to code it using qualitative software such as QDA Miner 5.

In terms of my career in academia, my time participating in the DHS SRT program and follow-on funding projects from 2019 through 2024 have helped me achieve tenure and promotion to the status of Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, helped me be nominated and named Department Chair of the History, Social Sciences and Religion department at Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU), and win the 2023-2024 ENMU Presidential Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity. Overall, working on these DHS SRT projects with CINA has made me really embrace my mentor, leadership, and scholarly roles to my full potential, so much so that I now have students coming to me to ask if I will have any more research opportunities for them to participate in.

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The COEs are a critical part of our mission to understand and prepare for the future of homeland security. This entails not only trying to solve problems before they materialize, but to also discover ways to advance technology to give us new capabilities.

The COEs are doing use-inspired research that is aligned to S&T research objectives and DHS mission priorities, and that support the federal cybersecurity R&D strategy. This includes work advancing cybersecurity through human-centered approaches, realizing trustworthy and secure AI; developing technologies to deter, detect, and respond to cyber adversaries and criminals; and developing the workforce through education and training to adapt to the evolving threat environment.

I have had great experiences working with the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), CINA, and CAOE. When I first joined S&T, I had very little experience with the broader array of critical infrastructure that is associated with homeland security. Fortunately, I was able to leverage the research out of CIRI’s Characterizing End-to-End Risk of the Telecommunications Supply Chain to get up to speed on information communications technology risks. Furthermore, as CISA, USCG, and international partners engage us on maritime and port security risks, we are able to leverage CIRI experts to increase our technical understanding of the research areas and inform our collaboration plans as we develop new projects with our strategic partners.

I am also excited about the CAOE, whose research in evaluating trustworthiness in LLMs and using AI to improve software bill of materials (SBOM) adoption was critical as we developed the federal cybersecurity R&D Strategic Plan research objectives and priority use cases in protecting software and hardware supply chains, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence, and minimizing privacy risks. This work ensured that the research goals were based on solid academic understanding of the state of the science and but could also be tied to specific homeland security needs. We were able to further leverage these materials to build specific foundational and use-inspired R&D project plans for human-AI teaming and AI Cybersecurity efforts within S&T.

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Two years ago, I never would have believed that moving to Omaha, Nebraska, would broaden my horizons in the way it has. But, as part of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center (NCITE), a DHS COE, I have had opportunities to work with some of the best academics and practitioners in the counterterrorism field, both here at UNO and within our larger international consortium. This experience has prepared me in a unique way, by providing me with exposure to new methodologies, disciplines, and even project management skills, while still allowing me to conduct my own research.

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Callie Vitro working with IAPSS. Photo credit: Callie Vitro/UNO.

One project in particular that I am so grateful to be a part of is International Academic Partnerships for Science and Security (IAPSS), a global knowledge exchange hub that perfectly incapsulates the collaboration and commitment to problem-solving that is prioritized in a COE. Thanks to this project, I have recently been given the opportunity to develop an international early career researcher network in counterterrorism, a testament to the future-oriented thinking of NCITE and COEs in general. I still have years remaining in my graduate school education, but I am excited to see what comes next at NCITE—being part of a COE means new challenges, complex questions, and exciting ways to tackle them as a team. 

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It’s hard to believe that the COEs are celebrating their 20-year anniversary. Even more astonishing is that I’ve served 14 years of my federal career supporting the COE Program. Reflecting on this milestone, I am filled with a deep sense of pride and gratitude for the journey I’ve been on and the remarkable people I’ve had the honor of working alongside.

From the very first day I joined OUP, I felt an immediate connection to the mission and the work we do. My role has allowed me to bring together some of the most accomplished and thoughtful scientists in our nation with dedicated personnel from our DHS components, other federal agencies, industry, and local communities to tackle some of the most challenging homeland security issues of our time. Something special happens when these brilliant minds come together in a collaborative, safe space where innovation thrives, leading to meaningful, on-the-ground changes that make a real difference in people’s lives and strengthen the security of our nation.

One of the most fulfilling aspects of my role as the program manager for DHS COEs has been the opportunity to work with an extraordinary array of people. I’ve had the pleasure of engaging with leading experts from academia, dedicated professionals from various organizations, visionary leaders from private industry, and passionate contributors from local communities. Each interaction has been a source of inspiration and a testament to the power of collective effort. These individuals have not only shared their expertise but have also invested their time, energy, and heart into our mission. Their commitment and enthusiasm have been nothing short of extraordinary, and I am profoundly grateful for their willingness to contribute.

As I look back on these 14 years, I am reminded of the countless moments of achievement and the collective efforts that have brought us to this significant anniversary. Each project, each partnership, and each success story has reinforced my belief in the power of collaboration and the importance of our work. I am excited to continue this journey, knowing that together we will keep making strides toward a safer, more secure future for all Americans.

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this incredible journey. Your contributions and dedication are what make this work so rewarding and meaningful. Here’s to many more years of making a difference together.

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