APA hosted a meeting Aug. 9-10 to help officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) design curriculum recommendations for institutions offering coursework in homeland security. The group also made suggestions for topics to be covered in a two-week training program for law enforcement officers, tentatively called the "National Homeland Security Academy."
While the curricula are works-in-progress, APA participation will help ensure they include topics from the behavioral sciences, such as risk-analysis, responding to and recovering from disaster, and decision-making theory, says Geoffrey Mumford, PhD, APA's director of science policy. The courses may also cover the histories of the 22 agencies that combined to make up DHS and provide a primer on the congressional appropriations process.
--S. DINGFELDER