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

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