After a highly competitive grant process, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has chosen Northeastern to be a new Center of Excellence for Explosive Detection, Mitigation, and Response.
The university will receive a grant of $10 million over the next four years, and will assume a leadership role in research involving explosives detection, mitigation, and response, which could create the next generation of passenger screeners, liquid-explosive and poison-gas detectors, and bomb-resistant buildings.
President Aoun praised the research team who won the grant, led by electrical and computer engineering professor Michael Silevitch, E’65, ME’66, PHD’71.
“This grant will support the work of a visionary group who exemplify our university’s growing leadership in fundamental and translational research,” Aoun says. “Their work is vital to our national security, and we recognize the import of the confidence the Department of Homeland Security has placed in us.”
Silevitch, director of the Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS), says the grant recognizes the center’s engineering and technological expertise: “Preventing terrorist attacks is perhaps our foremost national- security challenge, and we are confident our research will lead to methods to prevent and mitigate any such attacks.”
Northeastern will collaborate with the University of Rhode Island on the new center, called ALERT (Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats). URI will focus on education as a counterpoint to the Gordon CenSSIS focus on research. An additional $1.6 million in funding from the Massachusetts John Adams Institute will be used to
foster industry collaborations.
“I commend Northeastern for receiving this impressive grant,” says U.S. senator Edward Kennedy. “I’m confident the center will produce the expertise in disaster prevention and response that our nation urgently needs.”