They’re All Chemicals

Guest: Dr. Laura Parker, Senior Advisor for Sensors and Detection Technologies, S&T

Host: Brittany Greco, Senior Communications Specialist, S&T

[00:00:00] Dr. Laura Parker: Fentanyl, the synthetic opioids. synthetic drugs in general, explosives, chemical warfare agents. I mean, they’re all chemicals. Can you project into the future and what would the next illicit substance be? That’s pretty challenging. DHS has five labs each group has their strengths and that goes into this idea of, you know, with opioid detection, what would the next threat be?

[00:00:27] Dave DeLizza: This is Technologically Speaking, the official podcast for the Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, or S and T as we call it. Join us as we meet the science and technology experts on the front lines, keeping America safe.

[00:00:43] Brittany: Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Technologically Speaking. I am Brittany Greco, your host, and I’m so honored to be joined today by Dr. Laura Parker from S& T.

[00:00:52] Dr. Laura Parker: Yeah, thanks, Brittany.

[00:00:54] Brittany: You are our Senior Advisor for Sensors and Detection Technologies here at S&T.

[00:00:59] Dr. Laura Parker: Yes. So, I come from the explosives detection world originally.

[00:01:03] Brittany: Oh, okay.

[00:01:04] Dr. Laura Parker: Very focused on aviation security at DHS S&T, but there are obviously other areas that explosives detection is really useful for, like what we call soft targets, crowded places. For whatever reason, humans seem very. interested in explosives. My husband says it’s really great at cocktail parties to mention that I’m an explosives expert. But, people are always interested in that. And, oh, it must be so great to blow stuff up. And I, I guess I wandered off into the explosives side. And, we look at giving advice and also looking at emerging technologies and how to apply them to DHS mission space. Including all the components at DHS S&T, as well as first responders, state, local, and providing support for homeland.

[00:01:57] Brittany: That’s great. You mentioned how people think that you just blow stuff up all day in your work. And it’s actually like, no, we’re not trying to blow things up. We want to make sure we can figure out what those explosives materials might be. So, if we’re talking about someone who might be at airport screening, checkpoint, what might they have seen that you’ve worked on or that S&T has worked on that we’re really hoping to help them understand all the science behind the things that they might have interacted with in their everyday lives?

[00:02:23] Dr. Laura Parker: A lot of people have been in an airport and the checkpoint. There’s a lot going on. Even with how an airport is set up and the jurisdiction of an airport. So, the TSA is one of our components that we support at S&T, they will buy equipment and install it the Transportation Safety Officers, or Transportation Security Officers, that you give your ID and go through a checkpoint, they all work for TSA, but it turns out the airport itself has an airport authority. Airports are very interesting when you go through the checkpoint, they do a check that, you know, that you’re supposed to be flying that day and what flight you’re on and then you have to remove your bags and your shoes. If you don’t have TSA pre-check all of us want to be able to keep our shoes on. It’s a very complicated detection environment, which is why you are continuing to take off your shoes. We’re working on that, we want to be able to make it as smooth as possible to get through there. So, you put all your possessions on the conveyor belt, and it goes through x-ray imaging equipment. We call that primary screening and hopefully you don’t get an alarm on anything. And if you do get an alarm, it goes to secondary screening, and that tends to be the trace explosive systems. They try to pull out whatever is alarming or they swab around the bag. And what I mean by swabbing is they’re collecting particles a trap or a swab, and it’s inserted into a explosive trace detection system. I have worked on that in the past. Hopefully, you don’t alarm again on the secondary alarm. If you keep alarming, you know, they have to use other methods to resolve that alarm. Then some people have to go through the AIT machines, advanced imaging technology and that’s where you have to pose and that system uses millimeter wave technology. Magnetometers are used regularly and you can think the 1970s and the hijackings that occurred for how we have magnetometers, cause that back in the day, they were keeping weapons off of planes. And, you know, so there’s a long history, which people may or may not know about or remember, but the checkpoint has really evolved. TSA currently has a lot of emphasis on passenger experience and trying to improve travel a lot more people travel than used to, a lot more families travel, people with strollers, people that are in wheelchairs or maybe more, immobile, that’s another area that we try to keep up with of how to really help folks get through, the, the airport system.

[00:05:27] Brittany: Can you tell us a little bit more about the swabbing. Can you tell us about some of the technology involved in that process?

[00:05:32] Dr. Laura Parker: Well, the current systems that are deployed are called ion mobility spectrometers, and that has a long history, actually from the chemical warfare agent detection area explosives are chemicals, so that kind of technology is used. And currently we’re looking for trace residues and trace you can’t see it with the naked eye easily. It’s actually an analytical chemistry tool that’s been around for many years. Now, we’d really like to make it faster and add more threats of interest that we’re looking for. A lot of research goes into that the false alarms. That’s something we really have to keep in mind how to not have a lot of alarms. So, you have a trade-off with how many threats of interest you’re looking for versus having a lot of alarms. They also use, what’s called colometric kits for specific types of chemicals of interest. The TSO, or Transportation Security Officers, working at their station might have to, check. There’s a chemical reaction and they show a color change on a strip of paper, and that isn’t used as often as these ETD machines, for a variety of reasons.

[00:06:58] Brittany: What is an ETD machine?

[00:06:59] Dr. Laura Parker: Explosive trace detection. Yeah, that’s our lingo for saying ETDs. If people are chemists out there, they might ask, do we use, mass spectrometers? And that’s a pretty common laboratory, chemistry, analytical chemistry technique that’s used. And there’s a lot of interest in trying to, improve the technology. Currently, we still use the ion mobility spectrometers that are frankly cheaper, and somewhat more streamlined to use in an airport environment but we’re always trying to identify what the next technology could be. That could really be an improvement. TSA would really like to move on from that and let people carry larger amounts of liquids with them. And, so they have bottle liquid scanners, also, but that again, that’s a secondary technique. That isn’t used as often. I noticed these detection techniques at the airport because I work in that area. Maybe the average public is just trying to get through.

[00:08:08] Dr. Laura Parker: We do think about how to make things more automated in a realistic way. No, we’re not rolling these things out, but there are discussions of, not touching any of your items, people walking through more easily. I think that’s an important message to send to people. We are always trying to look at what’s the next thing that would help. I mean, certainly a border could use some similar techniques. One of my colleagues talks about a robotic arm, maybe that would swab instead of humans doing it. One reason that’s important is that it turns out you need a constant pressure or a way to swab. And we’ve worked with labs like NIST for standardization of that and training purposes. The interplay of technology and training people. It’s really a variety of folks at DHS S&T that would look at standards and standards for training of our TSOs and others, and how much has been done in that area for, you know, proper swabbing technique to pick up as much of the trace residues as you can. And, that helps for one, in trace, you have to be able to find the residues. So, you know, that’s an area of, you know, the interplay of not just chemistry, right?

[00:09:33] Dr. Laura Parker: But even materials and or methods. And we worked on what’s called a pressure sensitive wand with NIST, where it would have a light, like a red light, green light. When you swab, would you have the correct pressure? Things like that are something that I never thought about as a researcher in the lab when, you know, when you’re a grad student, for lack of a better term, you’re kind of like cheap labor. So, you do a lot of work or you work a lot. It’s not necessarily super efficient, but you’re also learning. But then, when you’re talking about airport environments and operations, you want to give your workers efficient tools.

[00:10:16] Brittany: I think you made an important point about saying that explosives are really about chemicals. So, I understand that S&T is also looking at ways to apply some of these detection technologies as we look for synthetic opioids, things like fentanyl. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about how we’re taking some of the expertise we have in explosive detection and applying it to illicit drug detection.

[00:10:39] Dr. Laura Parker: So, there’s definitely crossover. Fentanyl, the synthetic opioids, synthetic drugs in general, explosives, chemical warfare agents. I mean, they’re all chemicals. So, there’s definitely crossover in the technical areas and the technology and the equipment. DHS S&T and Customs and Border Protection, CBP have labs and experts they have a really long history, right, of looking for illicit substances, the synthetic drugs have really become more and more prevalent, and fentanyl is, you know, the most well-known of them and just how to deploy equipment in an efficient manner is one of the goals. And fentanyl really poses a lot of issues because of the amounts that are coming through in all kinds of ways. So that’s a really complicated system where you don’t want to slow down the movement of people and goods, but the fentanyl has caused a lot of issues in the country and the kind of public health side.

[00:11:47] Brittany: No, it’s a huge problem. So that trace detection is increasingly important. You hope to make things faster in terms of detection. Are there any specific projects you and your team are working on aimed to achieve that?

[00:11:59] Dr. Laura Parker: I’d mentioned looking at detection as a system, and I’m an expert in, you know, the specific technology that detects chemicals. Let’s say, and actually, I’ve worked in x-ray imaging as well, but, but that being said, there’s an interplay, especially with computing power and AI methods, how you could take the chemical data you can get and make more and more inferences about it and merge the layers of data you can get. Years ago, you’d have all this paper, people had to do it in their brains and make correlations, and now we have a lot more data tools to be able to correlate. That really is the future. And we have multiple experts in the area of AI data. It’s called data analytics. There are a number of commercially available detection systems that can detect opioids or synthetic opioids and explosives. And there is kind of a systems approach to looking at how do we define the requirements for what you’re seeing to define requirements for what our end users would want to detect in the field. And I think this goes into the questions about, can you project into the future and what would the next illicit substance be?

[00:14:00] Dr. Laura Parker: That’s pretty challenging, but also there, engaging a community of industry partners, academics, national labs. DHS has five labs and engaging everybody. Each group has their strengths and that goes into this idea of, you know, with opioid detection, what would the next threat be? This is a really, complicated area where the international drug cartels have a lot of incentives in their world of, you know, it’s a lot of money is that they’re bringing in and the governments, and not just the U.S. government, but around the world, have to balance what their resources are for the threats. So with, I can’t remember what I said with, so opioid detection, so we have commercially available technology. We also have to look at how straightforward is it to keep adding chemicals. There’s groups looking at what we like to call agnostic detection, that you wouldn’t necessarily have to know the exact chemical, but the family of chemicals and, the way the chemical molecules are produced. Yeah, you could have a backbone that you look for, but again, fentanyl itself is not illegal because it is used in for medical purposes and highly regulated. And that also is a contributing factor to, you can’t outright ban it and opioids in general. I mean, again, fentanyl has medicinal use, really important medicinal use, it turns out, but how to work with that and new drugs. So these international drug cartels, it’s becoming more and more apparent and known. They do have skilled technical people working for them. The other thing I think that’s important for people to bear in mind, you know, you would ask me about the technologies and I started talking about, you know, the environment, right? I didn’t even tell you what technologies are used. And one of the reasons I do that is that it really matters what the operational environment is like. At S&T, I’m not an end user, so I need to go out and talk to end users and see what their environment is like.

[00:16:37] Brittany: And when we say end users, we’re talking about the officials, you know, like the TSOs, the folks from CBP who are in the field, the people who would actually be using these technologies.

[00:16:46] Dr. Laura Parker: I’m not an expert in CBP’s operational environment. I tend to know more about the aviation security, but yes, so I mentioned TSOs and aviation security. There’s a group at CBP that are the field officers and they’re at ports of entry we were talking about the trace detectors, which use eye mobility spectrometry. You have to think about, an airport environment is inside, almost always well controlled, believe it or not. It may not feel like it, but it is. If you went to a port of entry, especially a really busy one, it’s eye opening. You know, the number of people going through, if you’re on the southern border or the northern border, very different temperatures, depending on the time of year, and, also weather, and just the equipment itself has to be deployed in a manner that it can be used, whether there’s electrical outlets available. Everybody wants everything to be portable, like you’re. iPhone size, but that’s not realistic for a lot of chemical detectors, at least currently. That’s something to keep in mind. A lot of the best, most sensitive chemical analysis can be done on laboratory equipment. That laboratory equipment, can you really bring it to a field? A big mass spectrometer, which I mentioned before that is the gold standard typical analytical chemistry lab, shrinking that with the technology inside of it, power, weight, you know, we have to think of all of that when we deploy this equipment.

[00:18:29] Brittany: And that’s a lot to consider, there’s so many different factors depending on the environment that these are going to be used in, and it’s really about making sure that they’re usable, useful, accurate, that this is helping the officials on the ground get the information they need to make decisions in the moment, because, we can’t wait for it to get back from the lab. They need to know right now if this stuff is, something that needs to be screened and, prevent it from coming into the country.

[00:18:52] Dr. Laura Parker: They do actually send things back. CBP does have support labs on site and they also have what they call reach back lab capability, but that’s not ideal. And you would like to have real time analysis, there’s a lot more going on with a lot of, constraints, really. Right. that’s part of Tech Center’s job is to look at what are the constraints and emerging technology and how it could potentially be used in a way, that’s helpful to our end users but also you don’t want a really long line.

[00:19:34] Brittany: So, I want to talk about something that you mentioned earlier about, again, Explosives are chemicals. You have a background in chemistry. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your career journey to get to this point. was it a relatively straight path or were there some zigs and zags along the way?

[00:19:43] Dr. Laura Parker: It’s more zigzaggy than straight, and maybe just what I thought I was going to do with a chemistry degree versus what I have done is, you know, pretty interesting. I thought I was going to be a biology person because I really liked biology in high school, I went to college and I was going to take chemistry and biology, probably be a biochemist. I actually have a double major with German because I really liked learning another language. And I studied a year in Germany

[00:20:18] Brittany: Where did you study?

[00:20:19] Dr. Laura Parker: Goettingen in Germany, which is a it’s not as well-known as many big German universities like Tübingen and Heidelberg, but at one point, Göttingen had the most Nobel Prize winners of any university. Of course, it was before World War II really well known quantum physicists had studied there, I didn’t know that I actually just studied German and I sat in on one chemistry class, but then I went to grad school for chemistry after that. The German was helpful in chemistry. It turns out, especially my era, there were chemistry journal articles that were written in German, especially from earlier, you know, the, 40s, 50s into the 60s. It did help to know German. And actually my college, to be a chemistry major I went to grad school for chemistry and. I went to Penn State. I worked for a new professor. So, my graduate advisor in chemistry got his tenure while I was a student of his, my advisor and I got really great article in Science Magazine, which is like one of the premier science journals to publish in. And that, you know, really helped both of us in our careers. And then I did a postdoctoral fellowship to work at Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC for two years. I went there to work on a semiconductor system and I ended up working on a pyrotechnic system with the group I worked in, and that set me on the path to work on explosives, which I would not have predicted.

[00:22:07] Dr. Laura Parker: And then I got different jobs that were, more in that explosives world. I worked at a, another Navy lab, Naval Surface Worker Center at Indian Head, which was very kind of traditional Navy, the way we view explosives is safety. You sleep with your munitions on a ship, you know, if there’s an accident, you know, there’s really nowhere to run easily. So, a lot of programs in the Navy are about safety of munitions. And that was where we did blow things up in the lab sometimes. And then through a series of events ended up at DHS S& T. Again, being able to apply my knowledge to fentanyl crisis and other illicit substances we might be interested in finding.

[00:22:55] Brittany: It seems like just even a decade ago, we weren’t hearing about fentanyl as much. So, it sounds like there’s new stuff coming out. new innovations, both in explosives, both in, you know, illicit materials that we want to, prevent from coming into the country. The innovation that’s happening by our adversaries, how do we keep up in that race?

[00:23:12] Dr. Laura Parker: There’s an interplay with really trying to see what the market has out there, working with groups that watch the intelligence and also local law enforcement trends that they’re seeing. CBP, Customs and Border Protection, they work with a community you know, we have drug enforcement agency. I’m on the edge of maybe forgetting some groups, but they’re that sort of world, the trade and commerce. They’re seeing with international drug cartels and how they move goods. there’s a connection to human trafficking always, which is also something we didn’t hear as much about 10, 15 years ago, with the current state of commerce, the internet, people moving around this is how we’ve come to be where we are, right? And then you can look at technology and how we can use that to help us in our current state. And then looking to the future, that’s another area people I work with they look a lot at AI and AI tools. I mean, I joke at work you can’t go a day without someone mentioning AI in the workplace.

[00:24:29] Brittany: It is definitely a hazard of working at an R& D organization as we’re always hearing about.

[00:24:33] Dr. Laura Parker: Oh well, both what can we do with it and what should we be concerned about, right?

[00:24:38] Brittany: Definitely.

[00:24:40] Dr. Laura Parker: One thing about being the senior advisor for sensors and detection, other than that whole title is a mouthful is, yeah, I do have the advantage of having worked in this area at least 20 years. Not everybody can be working on the broad issues or it gets overwhelming to prioritize. It’s very important to identify what we think the problems are and get some verified information that’s a problem. You know, sometimes you think things are a problem and then you delve in and, maybe it isn’t as big of an issue. We as a group have to rack and stack or rank, the problem space to be able to focus. I definitely believe in data driven solutions. I’m a scientist.

[00:25:25] Brittany: Right.

[00:25:26] Dr. Laura Parker: I had a boss once that said at his level, he said, well, Laura, if these were easy problems, they wouldn’t be coming to me. They would be solved by now. Clarify what you think the problem is and, whether the data exists. In my world, I could come up with a project or activity to try to get more data an area. We talk about technology when we started with high mobility spectrometry and what do I mean by data? Sometimes data is the problem set. You know, and sometimes data is literally like what chemicals am I taking a spectrum of and the interplay of that. It’s really a struggle of what’s needed right now you kind of have to balance what resources are available. And, we do talk a lot about futures. And that’s become something I’ve noticed the last couple of years of really trying to project into the future and what, you challenges we’re going to have and, a typical program manager has to do at least a certain amount of strategy how long does it take this technology to, to be developed?

[00:26:42] Brittany: In terms of synthetic opioid detection, fentanyl detection, how are youth approaching that problem, balancing that need for short term solutions while also making sure we’re, you know, making big strides towards, future advances that will help?

[00:26:59] Dr. Laura Parker: You really have to marry the technology with the, use case in the field. One of the challenges is we would like to use a detector for everything. I would call it maybe a universal detector. There’s always a joke about tricorders for you Star Trek fans out there, which I am one. But that’s, it’s a lot more complicated to, you know, a lot of times you have to find the technology that fits with the use case. So, detecting opioids, which is more my area of screening, screening for the chemicals. People also look at the whole system.

How drug cartels work and how they move drugs and the movement of money. It’s really a whole system versus just, my area, which tends to be the chemistry.

[00:27:46] Brittany: So, in Star Trek, they had a device called a tricorder that could measure environmental factors and act as a detector for things like oxygen. NASA has developed something similar. Are there any attempts on the part of S&T to develop something similar or, you know, something like that with capabilities to assist with explosive or opioid detection?

[00:28:04] Dr. Laura Parker: So, the discussion about tricorders, I think, goes into the area of what I would call universal detector. And that, again, we were talking about chemicals, and explosives are chemicals, opioids are chemicals, synthetic opioids. well, as well as naturally occurring opioids. So I would say there’s always an interest in saying we want a detector. The issue is the interplay of how many chemicals you can detect, a false alarm rate, you know, so getting a wrong answer and what it takes to work on the components and the inner workings of that chemical system. And that’s where I was talking about, could you use more data? Can you use more, machine learning algorithm techniques that runs into the AI category? That’s a huge challenge.

[00:29:04] Brittany: What types of problems really interested you as you were going through your career and how have those changed throughout your career?

[00:29:10] Dr. Laura Parker: My original research in graduate school was on a system that was not, commercializable, very fundamental research, you know, the kind of NSF funded, area. And I wasn’t thinking that much about practical end use cases. I actually worked in an area of chemistry. We call it solid state chemistry. And I worked with metals at high pressures and temperatures like those found within the Earth’score.

[00:29:43] Brittany: Nice.

[00:29:44] Dr. Laura Parker: There’s a whole community that looks at this, but they’re more geophysicists that’s actually part of way I got the postdoc at Naval Research Lab, because principal investigator. At Naval Research Lab wanted someone who knew how to work at high pressures and temperatures.

[00:30:02] Brittany: Why do you think that was?

[00:30:03] Dr. Laura Parker: Well, explosives is a really broad category. It happens in a higher pressure and temperature regime. Sometimes more just high temperature, like pyrotechnics. are on fire. And, they’ll have a sound, but they actually aren’t detonating. And there’s a lot of distinction between a detonation and just something that’s, deflagrating, we say, which is on fire. You know, there’s a lot of distinction there and there’s a long history of working with explosives for weapons. That world is really fascinating. And again, humans really love explosives for some reason. And pyrotechnics, I mean, they are really pretty, what’s interesting is I will say I am not particularly talented at math. And because not a lot of scientists talk about this. I work with a lot of engineers who are very good at math, I have a daughter who doesn’t love science and math like I did. I actually did like math. But I found the higher the level of math, it became more and more challenging. And I have told her, look, I wasn’t in advanced math you know, middle school or high school, and I still got a PhD in chemistry.

[00:31:17] Brittany: It can happen to you.

[00:31:19] Dr. Laura Parker: I think sometimes it may actually make you work harder.

[00:31:20] Brittany: So you mentioned your daughter, do you have any, I guess guidance or advice for folks who might be looking to get into this field in terms of, not just things to study, but maybe questions they can ask themselves along the way?

[00:31:18] Dr. Laura Parker: Definitely, when I talk to groups, or I’m asked now, what am I trying to do? And I think 15, 20 years ago, you know, I was thinking more like a diehard scientist, very technical. Now I would say kind of more strategic. I think it, you know, you do need to focus in an area and become an  expert and also think about what do you really like to do? I really like to solve puzzles.

[00:32:05] Brittany: Oh, okay. Yeah.

[00:32:10] Dr. Laura Parker: And I think that’s important to keep in mind, you know, do you like solving problems? I mean, some problems are really hard and they’re not all that easy to solve.

[00:32:20] Brittany: So who is your favorite Star Trek character and why?

[00:32:22] Dr. Laura Parker: It’s Uhura, actually,

[00:32:24] Brittany: Yeah.

[00:32:25] Dr. Laura Parker: Both versions of her. The ability to know that many languages, I think is pretty

impressive. But the character, she was at least, a female on the bridge with an important job.

[00:32:38] Brittany: She’s great. Laura, thank you so much for being with us today, and thank you all for listening.

[00:32:42] Dr. Laura Parker: Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk to you today. And I hope people, you know, learn more about what we do at DHS S&T.

[00:32:50] Dave: Thank you for listening to Technologically Speaking. To learn more about what you’ve heard in this episode, check out the show notes on our website, and follow us on Apple and Google Podcasts, and on social media at DHS SciTech. DHS SCI TE CH. Bye!