The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is seeking applications from U.S. colleges and universities to serve as lead or partner institutions for a Critical Infrastructure Resilience Center of Excellence (CIRC).
The DHS Centers of Excellence (COE) are university consortia that work closely with DHS to conduct research, develop and transition mission-relevant science and technology, and educate the next generation of homeland security technical experts. Each COE is led by a U.S. college or university and has multiple partners.
The new CIRC will be a fully-integrated component of the COE network and will take advantage of the network’s resources to develop mission-critical research, education, and technology transition programs.
The CIRC will conduct research and education to enhance the resiliency of the Nation’s critical infrastructures and the businesses and public entities that own and operate those assets and systems. The research will provide a better understanding of the complex business of risk management in the context of potential catastrophic disruptions to infrastructure operations.
DHS expects this Center to develop tools and analyses that infrastructures owners and operators and policy makers can use to increase the resilience of critical infrastructures. This Center will also conduct research on how infrastructure may evolve, how commerce may impact this evolution, and how resiliency may be built into future infrastructure environments.
The Federal government has a compelling interest in getting industries and regional economies working again as soon as possible after a catastrophic man-made or naturally occurring event. This is always true, but particularly so in locales where there is an intersection of significant probabilities of catastrophes, infrastructure systems and industries that are critical to the functioning of the U.S. economy.
Further details are available under DHS-14-ST-061-COE-CIRC-001A. The application submission deadline is September 23, 2014.
