This summer, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) hosted three teams of researchers, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The three research teams were selected by the Office of University Programs in the DHS's Science and Technology Directorate to participate in its Summer Faculty and Student Research Team Program.
This program is designed to provide faculty and students from minority-serving institutions with an opportunity to engage in homeland security-related research at DHS-affiliated venues. Following a competitive application process, DHS identified three teams whose research interests were related to the mission of START. These three teams -- involving faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students -- worked with START investigators in College Park throughout the summer to conduct research projects that will generate findings of interest to policy-makers and academics alike.
Summer/Faculty Research Teams at START, Summer 2005
Joshua Freilich, Associate Professor
Albert Gamarra, Doctoral Student
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Research Topic: Focuses on the association between the ideology and culture of far-right wing groups, and a number of political crimes, such as gun violations, tax charges, land use crimes, financial schemes, anti-government attacks, anti-global attacks, anti-abortion crimes and hate-crimes. Will investigate whether crimes are the product of the same causal forces, and whether there are patterns in that some crimes generally precede others on both the micro and macro-levels.
Angela Cole, Assistant Professor
Billie Sadler, Doctoral Student
Tarra Jackson, Undergraduate Student
Department of Social Psychology, Howard University
Research Topic: Reactions to terrorizing events and subsequent responses from institutional authorities, including the effects of security threats and death-related thoughts on the relationship between individuals' perceptions of fairness and their judgments about authorities and institutions. Summer research focuses on the relationship between individuals' attitudes and values and how those individuals perceive and react to risk.
Manoj Jha, Assistant Professor
Kimberly Freeman, Undergraduate Student
Michael Jones, Undergraduate Student
Turkessa Parker, Undergraduate Student
Department of Civil Engineering, Morgan State University
Research Topic: Model uncertainty associated with terrorist strikes using an innovative probabilistic technique called Bayesian Networks. In order to develop a robust model that will have real-world applicability it is critical that the model is tested with various group-based and event-based terrorism datasets. As such, the proposed Bayesian Networks Approach will be tested with Global Terrorism Database and Minorities at Risk Database to forecast future terrorist activities.