Center for Defense and Homeland Security
Infrastructure Protection & Disaster Management
Events such as 9/11, Katrina, and the band of tornadoes that swept across the US, earlier this year, have elevated the federal, state, and local official’s awareness of the need to protect the nation’s 18 areas of critical infrastructure from man-made and, natural catastrophic disasters. Analysis of these events has clearly shown a vital need to improve federal, state and local preparedness and response. As such, this Infrastructure Protection and Disaster Management CDHS Unit, of interdisciplinary research scholars, are engaged in researching mitigation and recovery science and technology solutions.
Infrastructure Protection & Disaster Management Research
The Modeling, Simulation and Analysis (MSA) and Decision Support Systems (DSS) team 
will be conducting research in computational intelligence, economic game theory, and agent-based simulation. These research studies are intended to develop tools for real-time decision support in emergencies capable of integrating and assimilating multiple types of information, processing that information, and presenting it in a manner useful to a wide range of decision makers, to evaluate alternative policies and actions to deal with emergencies and anticipate cascading effects across interdependent systems.
The First Responders team of CDHS scholars will be collaborating with NC State Center for Research on Textile Protection and Comfort, NC State Forensic Sciences Institute, and K3 Enterprise, to research and develop advances to the improve protection of or to enhance the performance of responders as they carry out life-saving tasks. Technologies enablers, to cope with multi-hazard emergencies, include advanced materials for protective clothing that report on the health of the first responder. The geospatial remote sensing technology experience of this team will be vital in getting a more comprehensive understanding of decision support systems that can provide real-time logistical tracking and management of emergency supplies, equipment, and personnel for improving incident planning and response capability to analyze all-hazard disaster response and recovery operations, tactics, techniques, plans, and procedures for use in a real-time environments.
This team will also collaborate with, and leverage the research successes of the UNC Chapel Hill Center for Natural Disasters, Coastal Infrastructure, and Emergency Management DHS Center of Excellence.
The Community, Commerce and Infrastructure Resilience multidisciplinary CDHS team of scholars will conduct research to understand and develop approaches to improve community resilience across the United States, and advance community resilience, as well as determine ways where public investments can foster resilient communities. Building on the foundation of the Resilience Training, and clinical PTSD training by FSU’s faculty in the FSU-Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, Masters of Social Work program, this team will carry out research into metrics related to resilience, including the creation of validated metrics measuring the psychosocial impact of large-scale disasters and catastrophes on affected individuals and communities and measures of the effectiveness of societal and community resilience efforts across physical, economic, social, psychological and cultural dimensions.
This team is currently collaborating with K3 Enterprise and colleagues from Louisiana State University Center for Life Course and Aging, on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project to develop a conceptual design to model key elements for art therapy and narrative authoring tools that will allow service members to tell their own stories related to deployment experiences in a simple, intuitive Web Browser based graphic novel/sequential art format.