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Project Summaries

Research at the Center runs the gamut from the legal issues surrounding counter-terrorism to advanced computer simulations of urban disaster.

Leveraging the research capacity in each of NYU's fourteen different schools, CCPR has designed and implemented a variety of projects that enhance the nation's ability to prepare for and respond to crisis.

Synopses of our major projects are available below:

• Center on Law and Security
  The NYU School of Law's Center on Law and Security was established as a policy think tank to examine the legal dimensions of counter-terrorism and peacekeeping operations at both the national and international level. The Center's main initiative is its Program on Law and Security. The Program convenes policymakers, academics and law enforcement officials to discuss and issue recommendations on a wide range of security issues. The three main areas of focus are: The Domestic Context; the International Context; and the Middle East. The Program's publication, NYU Review of Law and Security, along with its public lectures and roundtables, have placed it in the mainstream of policy, research, outreach and informed debate on counterterrorism.


• Improving Robustness and Resiliency in Catastrophe Response Networks
  This project seeks to improve our understanding of the entire range of challenges and opportunities affecting our cities as they plan for catastrophe communications. Creating robust and resilient cities requires communications infrastructure and practices not just for responding to emergencies, but providing security and economic viability before, during, and after catastrophic events.


• International Center for Enterprise Preparedness
  The International Center for Enterprise Preparedness (InterCEP) is the world's first major academic center dedicated to private sector crisis management and business continuity. Post September 11th, businesses and other private sector organizations have increasingly acknowledged the need for organization-wide emergency management and business continuity programs. In the US alone, recent events have dramatized this need, from devastating hurricanes and wildfires in the Southwest and the blackout of the Northeast to tornadoes throughout the Midwest. Such occurrences necessitate an “all hazards” approach to emergency management and business continuity. Corporate preparedness can mitigate the impact of emergencies on both people and property, and in the end, the level of a corporation's preparedness can determine the ongoing viability of the firm. Since businesses and other private sector organizations own 85% of America's infrastructure and employ the vast majority of the country's employees, the private sector cannot be ignored in governmental planning for emergencies.


• Large Scale Emergency Readiness (LaSER)
  LaSER will improve the capabilities of federal, state, and local governments, as well as private organizations, to prepare for and respond to a large mass casualty incident. The research outlined below should be viewed as an initial phase which begins to identify the basic infrastructure for large-scale response. LaSER is composed of five related sub-projects, which will create a range of tools and new knowledge that will support the Department of Homeland Security's, as well as other federal, state and local, initiatives in urban preparedness.


• Medical and Dental Enhancements Project
  The aim of this project is to demonstrate methods of enhancing the response to truly catastrophic events that would overwhelm current capacity of the U.S. medical and public health response resources.


• Post-Katrina Research Projects
  After seeing the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina unfold in August 2005 CCPR mobilized to engage the NYU community through a university-wide research competition. The response was inspiring, as many faculty offered thoughtful and insightful proposals. These projects were chosen from among a crowded field of outstanding ideas. This work speaks to the very mission of CCPR, to find the best and brightest investigators from throughout the university to undertake path leading research into the complex nature of disasters. The Katrina researchers are a select group who has risen to the challenge of drawing meaning and lessons from a unique American catastrophe, Hurricane Katrina, that continues to and will for a long time pose questions on the national agenda.


• The Project on Organizational and Community Preparedness
  The Project on Organizational and Community Preparedness seeks to increase and sustain significant gains in governmental, nonprofit, educational, and private preparedness for potential terrorist attacks, including the use of weapons of mass destruction. Working closely with opinion leaders and executives across the sectors, the Project will create and disseminate best practices, standards, and measurement tools for increasing preparedness.


• The Politics of Facial Recognition Systems: Issues and Policy
  Facial recognition (FR) systems are considered a promising addition to the arsenal of technologies to be deployed in a battle against crime and terror. As a tool for scanning large numbers of people they would greatly improve the ability to identify known criminals and terrorists and even, in certain locations, function as a deterrent. Although there has been steady progress in the science and technology of video surveillance and FR systems, they are still far from perfect. The focus of this research project is a particular imperfection in FR systems that may have significant political ramifications.


• Public Infrastructure Support for Protective Emergency Services
  Protective emergency services, such as emergency management, health, police and fire protection, routinely depend upon a wide range of traditional infrastructure support services, including transportation, energy, water, environmental protection, and communication infrastructure, to provide and deploy human resources, goods, and information in times of crisis. This project identifies relationships between these two types of service areas – traditional infrastructure and emergency services - and vulnerabilities and choke points created at interconnection points among them during emergencies. The purpose is provide resources to prepare managers and operators of both traditional infrastructure services and emergency services with an explicit way of incorporating each others' needs into the design of their services.


• Public Safety Trauma Response
  PSTR is evaluating the two peer support programs currently available to New York City Police officers to address work related stress and trauma in anticipation of and following a terrorist attack or other catastrophic event. The results of the evaluation will provide first responder agencies with information on peer support programs and how a program can be implemented in a wide range of agencies regardless of size or location.


• Responding to Epidemic Threats Using Modern Bioinformatics Tools
  The goal of this project is to answer the urgent questions of how to deal with a "new" epidemic like SARS or Avian Flu: Are we equipped to rapidly identify and study new pathogens? Do we have the requisite analytical tools to classify the pathology of previously unknown biological agents? Do we have the detection technologies necessary to monitor our environments for biological threats and more importantly, how do we know if our tools are up to the task at hand?


• Urban Issues Research
  Recognizing NYU's unique characteristic of being one of the nation's premier research universities located only two kilometers from Ground Zero, Dr. Eric Klinenberg leads CCPR's inquiry into urban security and preparedness issues. This effort addresses topics such as the history of disaster planning programs and how social factors may enhance existing programs, and the state of crisis communications.

© 2008 The Center for Catastrophe Preparedness & Response