RAND Creates Homeland Security Center to Advance Domestic Terrorism Research

The RAND Corporation has created a Homeland Security Center to coordinate and strengthen its longstanding research on ways to protect the nation from terrorism and other domestic security threats, President and CEO James A. Thomson announced today.

“This center will enable RAND to more effectively bring together its expertise in areas such as terrorism and risk analysis to serve the governments at the federal, state and local level, along with the private sector,” Thomson said.

The director of the new center is K. Jack Riley. Since joining RAND in 1999, Riley has led a variety of counter-terrorism and homeland security projects, organized RAND's research on these topics for state and local governments, helped RAND expand its terrorism research, and worked with RAND's staff to develop new support for homeland security research.

These efforts have resulted in research on a variety of topics, including studies of first-responder readiness, the vulnerability of the nation's infrastructure, individual preparedness for terrorist attacks, and security procedures at airports, ports and at the nation's borders.

“RAND researchers have a broad range of expertise unmatched anywhere else about how to protect our nation,” Riley said. “We look forward to contributing further to the critical mission of making the nation safer and better able to respond to a broad array of threats.”

From 1995 to 1999, Riley was with the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was responsible for policy research dealing with crime, drug control, border and immigration control, and terrorism and domestic preparedness.