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The Department of Homeland Security announced plans for its new Center of Excellence for the Study of High-Consequence Event Preparedness on Jan. 14. Research proposals are due April 22.
Proposed studies should address a range of issues across five general themes, all of them within the province of psychology:
Preparedness. How can innovatively designed response structures effectively unify incident command, and what types of unified command are truly desirable in an emergency?
Prevention and deterrence. What combinations of vigilance, sensing, hardening, situational awareness and information operations will best prevent or dissuade terrorists from attacking?
Decision-making. How can we better understand decision-making before, during and after high-consequence events?
Effective response networks. How will individuals and organizations come together to solve a large-scale homeland security crisis?
Modeling and simulation. How can modeling and simulating high-consequence events help us prepare in the absence of real-life rehearsal?
The full announcement is available at www.orau.gov/dhsuce5.
--G. MUMFORD
