Higher Education assists and excels at Domestic Security

New Jersey Business, Apr 01, 2005 by McCoy-Pinderhughes, Paula

Immediately after the 9/11 tragedy, then New Jersey Acting Governor Donald DiFrancesco created the Critical Infrastructure Advisory Committee (IAC) under the Domestic Security Preparedness Task Force. It was assembled to organize the then 23 sectors within the civilian community and private sector to develop best practices and prepare vulnerability assessments, as part of an effort to pull together an immediate safety net of preparedness relative to counter-terrorism.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, assumed the lead role for the Higher Education University sector of the Task Force, says Donald Sebastian, senior vice president for research and development at NJIT and startup director of the New Jersey Homeland Security Technology Systems Center. He was so designated by then Governor James E. McGreevey in June 2004, due to NJIT's experience of roughly two or three years of working with state and local entities in improving critical response to homeland security.

"We had something of an insider's view of how not only New Jersey, but the country was dealing with the various issues of reconfiguration relating to the threat of onshore terrorism," says Sebastian, "and we've rationalized our center around the six categories of vulnerabilities that the Federal Department of Homeland Security describes: emergency response and preparedness; defense against weapons of mass destruction, protecting critical infrastructure; border and transportation security; domestic counter-terrorism, and intelligence and warning."

Finding that many problems could not be solved with a simple application on top of existing business practices and physical systems, Sebastian says the center needed to rethink and reengineer almost every element of the economy and way of life so that security would be a non-intrusive entity.

To that end, developing systems architecture that doesn't yet exist is what drives NJIT's Homeland Security Technology Center. "[This means] high level pictures of how we'll be able to deal with responding to some of the vulnerabilities in which we don't have enough bodies or enough dollars to throw at the problem and then working closely with the vendor community to identify the component parts that fit into that framework," says Sebastian.

Leslie W. Kennedy, dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University's Newark Campus, was approached after 9/11 by the Provost office to consider how he would respond to developing an academic and research focus around the current terrorism threat, especially in light of the fact that the School of Criminal justice was involved in similar types of issues related to safety programs already in place with local law enforcement. Several rounds of meetings with interested individuals from the School of Law, the Center for Global Change and Governance, the School of Criminal justice and the College of Nursing took place to discuss what could be done about the issue of security.

What emerged from those talks was a need to address a much broader agenda. In August 2003, the Center for the Study of Public Security was named, with Kennedy serving as the director. "The multidisciplinary and collaborative efforts of the center focus on public security as opposed to specifically focusing on counterterrorism. While the threat of terrorism still exists, we're trying to raise the awareness level and really start to focus on problem solving. Our focus is on consequences as opposed to threat or risk analysis," Kennedy says.

The center initiated a research program - the Security Monitoring Project - and found there was a lot of interest in the corporate and public health areas related to security. "We've gone out and interviewed Chief Security Officers at roughly 25 of New Jersey's major companies," acknowledges Kennedy, "using that as a way of identifying how CSO's are currently addressing security issues within the companies, and finding out what difficulties they're having understanding the threats outside their sphere of influence."

Part of that objective was to bring the information back to the center and put it into a problem-solving context. Then, business leaders were brought together in a neutral forum with law enforcement, and state and federal officials, in order, to get the information flow operating at a better level and develop better practices related to public security both locally and globally.

"The positive thing that has come out of this is that there is a great deal of receptivity both within government, the community, the corporate sector and other institutions including University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). By bringing together a community of experts and the expertise available here at Rutgers, weve moved from the information-sharing stage to the problem-solving phase," says Kennedy

On the biotechnology front, approximately 60 members from UMDNJ, NJIT and Rutgers University are working together in the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, located at Rutgers University, Busch Campus in Piscataway. The center received a three-year, $5-million Department of Defense contract to research and create innovative first aid medicines and devices for soldiers out in combat. They are currently researching a wound spray that soldiers can carry to prevent temperate to rigorous lesions and burns from worsening, as well as to alleviate pain, help restore tissue and possibly much more. It will facilitate the continuation of injured soldiers' missions.