Homeland Security marks 20 years of its academic centers of excellence

For 20 years, the Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate has operated what it calls Centers of Excellence. The program matches academics with tough challenges, with the directorate paying for research. For some highlights on the 20-year anniversary, the deputy director of the Office of University Programs, Jennifer Foley, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

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Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin This is a DHS S&T way of getting research done. Tell us more about it and how it distinguishes itself from the other ways that science and technology gets research done.

Jennifer Foley This is a great way that the science and technology and the department at large gets research done. We leverage the expertise offered by universities to conduct multidisciplinary research to tackle the hardest federal problems. One of the greatest assets of the program is that in a department such as the Department of Homeland Security that is largely operationally focused and therefore focused on tackling tomorrow’s challenge. The Centers of Excellence are not only given the latitude but expected to be forward looking and tackle and anticipate challenges that are coming down the road.

Tom Temin And does the Homeland Security Department, do they, I guess the question is, do they have a SBIR, Small Business Innovation Research authority, or is this maybe a way to get at the same issue without having an SBIR stage program?

Jennifer Foley They do have an SBIR program, but this is a different way of getting at the issues and a different way of tackling them altogether.

Tom Temin And how does that decision get made? Why this is better for academia, this one’s better for business, small business. Is it the degree of how basic the research is?

Jennifer Foley That is part of it. And part of it is looking at what is suitable for university research. Again, kind of taking that forward looking approach. What is suitable? Universities are typically a much lower TRL, technology readiness level operation, than would be a company or some of the performers that we have doing work in the rest of the directorate.

Tom Temin Give us some of the highlights of research you’ve had done over the years that have resulted maybe in some real discoveries or maybe getting into the hands of operators eventually at DHS?

Jennifer Foley Yeah, absolutely. And I think one that is particularly timely as we speak with tropical storm, potentially soon to be Hurricane Helene coming down the pipeline is the adsert prevention system. This was developed by our Coastal Resilience Center, which is, it can be used to predict storm surge flooding and high winds that are about to hit land. This is also being coupled with capabilities that are used by NOAA and used to to prepare for and hopefully prevent some of the damage being done by hurricanes.

Tom Temin And just explain the some of the terminology for us. You have the Centers of Excellence and then you have the Office of University Programs. What’s the meaning of each of those terms?

Jennifer Foley The Office of University Programs administers the Centers of Excellence, which is one of three complementary programs. The other two being workforce development and minority serving institutions. The Centers of Excellence are the ones that actually conduct the research. There is a federal program manager from the Office of University Program assigned to manage each of the Centers of Excellence.

Tom Temin And is the Center of Excellence, each one, is it a single institution or could it be a consortium of, say, several colleges and universities maybe working on the same problem?

Jennifer Foley They are all intended to be consortia. So while each is led by a single university or college, they partner with academic institutions around the country and around the world to conduct the research. That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on, is the size of the consortium. So although we have at any given time ten centers of excellence, the consortium is roughly 200 institutions wide.

Tom Temin And so therefore, one institution will be like the lead seeker of the grant. And then how do you make sure that the right people are involved in the center of excellence? Is that their decision? Or does DHS have a hand in saying, well, yeah, we’d like them, but maybe not them?

Jennifer Foley You are exactly correct that one center is the lead institution, and in order to become part of the consortium, that is left up to the lead institution. So we trust those that we have designated as lead universities. We trust them to bring in the right partners to conduct the research.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Jennifer Foley. She’s deputy director of the Office of University Programs at the Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. And what is the typical output from a grant going to a center of excellence? Is it a prototype of some kind, or could it be just a written piece of research? What form does it take?

Jennifer Foley Both of the above. Our primary product is, our primary output is our knowledge products, but we also do prototypes. There are also technology developments. We also do a lot of workshops. Another output is educational offerings and course offerings. So we have in the hundreds of both majors that have been developed by universities as well as certificate programs that have been developed by universities in the lead institutions for the Centers of Excellence.

Tom Temin Right. And you mentioned NOAA being, you know, a party to one of these research results, which means it’s inter-departmental and therefore, what’s the sharing mechanism by which, say another department, commerce or specifically NOAA, could come into a DHS-funded program and get some of the benefits from it?

Jennifer Foley That would be up to the outreach of the program managers. It is incumbent upon the federal program manager to let our counterparts around the government know that these products and know that the knowledge products are available, that prototypes are being developed, for example.

Tom Temin And where do you get your demand signals for what type of research might be needed? Does that primarily come from the many components of DHS?

Jennifer Foley The demand signal comes from the components of DHS. In addition, each center of excellence has a board of directors that is comprised of typically GS-15 and SES level individuals from around the department and around the federal government. The Board of Directors helps to advise the federal program manager on what’s coming down the pipeline, what’s keeping them up at night. Additionally, because we are asking the Centers of Excellence to be forward looking, some of the demand signal does come from the centers themselves. They let us know what’s going on and what they’re seeing in the spaces that they work in and bring that to our attention with research as well.

Tom Temin And the research takes place in sounds like many domains, chemistry sensing, artificial intelligence, I’m guessing. What are some of the top areas that draw research right now for DHS?

Jennifer Foley Absolutely. So all of the above, all of what you just mentioned, we have centers that run the gamut from coastal resilience, which I already mentioned, criminal investigations and network analysis, counterterrorism.

Tom Temin Screening passengers?

Jennifer Foley Screening passengers, we do look at that as well. Yeah.

Tom Temin Got it. And well, what does this all cost a year? Give us a sense of the dollars involved. Order of magnitude.

Jennifer Foley We’re at about $45 million a year.

Tom Temin And then once the research products are received and, you know, they deliver on what they have promised to come up with, how does that then transfer into industrial products that might actually be used by DHS? How does it make that valley of death from research to production?

Jennifer Foley Yes, the all-important valley of death. The knowledge products are all hosted on each of the Centers of Excellence websites. Each is required to have a website where research is accessible, and then from there, should a prototype be developed, it is again the responsibility of the federal program manager to get the word out about the technology. In addition, there have been numerous invention disclosures followed by patent, filings for patents.

Tom Temin Right. You got to get that prior art out there before you go to the patent, in other words.

Jennifer Foley Exactly.

Tom Temin And earlier, you mentioned in my final question that you have a different Center of Excellence cluster around minority-serving institutions. Are those and HBCUs and so forth, part of the academic Centers of Excellence that are there now, or do they have operate in a separate sphere?

Jennifer Foley They are inextricably linked. So the MSI work that we do, we have two separate programs that that comprises the MSI work. We have scientific leadership awards and we have summer research teams. The scientific leadership awards are relatively high investment. It’s a relatively high investment program that’s designed to build capacity over several years at an institution, whereas the summer research teams, it brings together early faculty, early career faculty and students to conduct research in partnership with the Center of Excellence during the course of a summer. Depending on how that goes, they are eligible for follow on funding in the fall once they return back to their academic institutions.

Tom Temin And now to get to the theme here of this, is 20 years of the Centers of Excellence under this program, the Office of University Programs. Sounds like you’re dubbing it a success.

Jennifer Foley Absolutely.

Jared Serbu Jennifer Foley is deputy director of the Office of University Programs at the Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. We’ll post this interview with federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Subscribe to the Federal Drive wherever you get your podcasts.

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