Research
I have experience researching and managing projects across a variety of domains and funders including including the Department of Homeland Security,1,2 Department of Defense,3 Department of State,4 US Coast Guard,5 and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.6
Experience
- Development of Anticipatory Human Social Systems Models and Adversary Weapon Selection Decision Processes
- Monitor and Mitigate the Impact of COVID-19 on Public Safety
- Synthetic Population Assisted Human-in-the-loop Influence Operations Simulation (SPA-HiLIOS)
- Divergent Dimensions of Radicalization Risk: Migration and Violent Extremism in Sabah
- The Road Less Traveled: Bolstering the Absorptive Capacity of Southern Central American States to Facilitate the Southern Flow of Northern Triangle Immigrants
- CBRNe Data Suite
- Datasets for Modeling and Mitigating Insider Risk (D-MInR)
- The Arctic All-Hazards GIS Platform
- Integrated Discovery of Emerging and Novel Technologies (IDENT)
- Global Terrorism Database (GTD)
Technical Lead
Development of Anticipatory Human Social Systems Models and Adversary Weapon Selection Decision Processes
June 2019 - February 2022
Description
This research effort will provide the U.S. government first of-its-kind adversary social systems models in support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s SIGMA+ Program. Results of this research effort, in addition to contributing to the success of the SIGMA+ Program, will also contribute greatly to the advancement of the U.S. government’s overall capability to defend against weapons of mass destruction/weapons of mass terror (WMD/WMT) threats. The research will result in several products that will become integral components of the SIGMA+ system, including an Adversary Weapon Selection Dataset (AWSD), an Adversary Automated Template Generation Tool (AATG Tool) and a Geospatial Risk Mapping Tool.
Responsibilities
- Pitched and designed a Python tool using Markov Chains to model terrorist plots to identify trends in pursuit of unconventional weapons based upon perpetrator ideology based on 517 open-source historical incidents
- Utilized k-mean clustering in Python, on 2,347 planning events corresponding to 270 unique terrorist incidents to identify significant spatial and temporal trends in terrorist plot planning for law enforcement interdiction strategy
- Lead developer producing ontology and repository which captures over 1,200 unique instances adversary behavior based on historical data and subject matter experts (SMEs) which can be used to generate hypothetical threat scenarios, train neural networks, and investigate threat spaces
- Developed an end-to-end automated system producing 30 hypothetical terrorist attack scenarios per minute in Python and embedding nearly two hundred nodes per scenario in real world datasets as a subgraph matching problem for algorithms teams
- Organized and lead, on average, six hours of meetings per week with stakeholders, funders, partner organizations, and internal teams across multiple projects
Synthetic Population Assisted Human-in-the-loop Influence Operations Simulation (SPA-HiLIOS)
December 2021 - February 2022
Project Manager
Monitor and Mitigate the Impact of COVID-19 on Public Safety
April 2021 - January 2022
Description
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has imposed costs on the country’s police, fire, and emergency medical services. These first responders risk exposure in their jobs, yet must maintain operations in order to ensure the safety of the communities they serve.
These first responder communities are key stakeholders within the homeland security enterprise (HSE), and their resilience in the face of the pandemic is of concern to DHS. Thus, START seeks to collect data on COVID-19 impacts on first responder communities and provide evidence-based best practices.
The goal of the project is to measure the impact of COVID-19, identify and share best practices organizations can put in place to protect themselves in the short term, and identify strategies to make first responder organizations more resilient to pandemics in the future.
Methods
The project will use a three-phase, mixed-methods approach. The team will review relevant and available literature, conduct interviews with first responders, leverage available survey data, analyze community-level contextual factors related to infection and mortality, and study the overall impact on service delivery in a sample of first responder organizations.
Responsibilities
- Technical lead in charge of team of four researchers
- Cleaned data from five million emergency calls across seven agencies and over twenty datasets in R and Python
- Analyzed five million emergency calls across six agencies using t-tests, ANOVAs, multiple regressions, and other statistical inference in R, Python, and STATA to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on first responders
- Leveraged SVM model to predict COVID-19 risk in zipcodes when case data was unavaiable or unreliable
- Lead author on five reports detailing analysis and results
Preliminary Findings
Personnel Shortages Due to COVID-19
COVID-19 Response Coordination
Divergent Dimensions of Radicalization Risk: Migration and Violent Extremism in Sabah
September 2020 - December 2021
Description:
State Department polling indicates that public support for the Islamic State (IS) is on the rise in Malaysia. Moreover, the Malaysian police claim to have thwarted dozens of terrorist attacks since 2013. Importantly, Malaysia has served as a transit hub and training ground for terrorists, and approximately one hundred Malaysians, including women and children, have traveled to Iraq and Syria to support the creation of IS. Though only a handful have returned, radicalization and recruitment to violence remain a risk in Malaysia, as evidenced by more than 430 terror-related arrests since 2013.
There are undoubtedly opportunities to mitigate these risks in Malaysia by addressing the dynamics of radicalization and mobilization to violence. This, however, requires nuanced understanding of the threat, and extant research capacity on terrorism and violent extremism in Malaysia is unfortunately limited. This is especially the case outside of Kuala Lumpur.
This project will begin to fill this gap. The proposed work will be conducted at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), and will focus on Sabah, where radicalization risks are especially high. This is the case as Sabah has the highest rates of undocumented migration in Malaysia. Sabah’s close proximity to the Philippines, combined with longstanding trade routes and close, cross-border familial ties between the two countries facilitate migrant flows. While the vast majority of emigrants are motivated by economic opportunity, extensive evidence suggests that Filipino violent extremist organizations (VEOs) are also exploiting these flows. Sabah is not merely a transit point for Filipino VEOs; rather some groups are actively engaged in radicalizing and recruiting Malaysians and Filipino expats living in Sabah.
Methods
The project team trained local researchers to conduct sensitive interviews based on best practices for both focus group and key informant interviews in conflict zones.
Preliminary Findings
Responsibilities
- Writing quarterly reports, tracking project progress, and financials
- Coordinating meetings with three teams of researchers in Malaysia and the United States
- Coordinating with the university’s Institutional Review Board to ensure safety of researchers and participants during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Ensuring compliance with human subject research laws in six countries
The Road Less Traveled: Bolstering the Absorptive Capacity of Southern Central American States to Facilitate the Southern Flow of Northern Triangle Immigrants
Septmeber 2020 - February 2021
Description
The project aims to expand on existing work on the niches of Northern Triangle immigrants living in Mexico to Costa Rica and Panama. It will do so through a data-driven analysis of a) the relationship between levels of violence, employment opportunities, and the number of Honduran, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan immigrants in Mexico, and b) the extent to which Northern Triangle migrants choose to settle in alternative locations, specifically Panama and Costa Rica. Findings in support of the hypothesis will result in a series of recommendation regarding what the U.S. Government (USG) could be doing to aid Panama and Costa Rica’s absorption of Northern Triangle migrants. If the findings suggest that Northern Triangle migrants choose not to settle in alternative locations, this project will further analyze the reasons that factor into that decision. Furthermore, it will consider what specific policies/investments the USG could undertake to encourage migration to those nations.
Methods
This project utilizes two main methodologies. First, as part of desk study that aims to understand migration dynamics of Northern Triangle migrants as well as Panama and Costa Rica’s capabilities and ongoing efforts, it will collect empirical evidence about the scope and density of Northern Triangle migrants in these countries. Researchers will exclusively use publically available immigration, employment, and public opinion statistics and data from Panama, Costa Rica, as well as Northern Triangle countries. The data then will be modeled using a nested model of analysis, beginning with descriptive statistics and building up to comparative and bivariate analyses. This portion of the project will allow us to better understand the scale of Northern Triangle out-migration throughout the region as well as the economic and social push/pull factors. Second, the project will utilize qualitative data collection by way of key informants that are professionals working in governmental and non-governmental migration organizations as well as focus groups with migrant populations in parts of Costa Rica and Panama with a high migrant density.
Preliminary Findings
COVID-19’s Impact on Business Absorptive Capacity
Responsibilities
- Writing monthly reports, tracking project progress, and financials
- Coordinating invoices with third party translation services
Researcher
CBRNe Data Suite
November 2021 - February 2022
Responsibilities
- Lead developer producing secure open-source data portal capturing over 800 variables for 600 chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear violent non-state actors, and incidents in Shiny
Datasets for Modeling and Mitigating Insider Risk (D-MInR)
May 2021 - September 2021
Description
Identify extant datasets that may be useful for future Insider Risk efforts for the US government (USG) and its allies and partners, and to characterize those datasets in terms of their location, relevance, accessibility, portability, reproducibility, and other key parameters. If successful, the primary deliverable would be a dataset catalog to help Insider Risk researchers best design research strategies to leverage these datasets to conduct exploratory research (i.e., develop new hypotheses, discover new patterns, build new models or tools) and/or confirmatory research (i.e., test and validate existing hypotheses, tools, and models).
Methods
Literature review, targeted search
Responsibilities
- Utilized domain expertise to identify relevant datasets, academic publications and data sources
- Queried for and collected relevant datasets through Kaggle, Github, DataMart, and other online repositories of data
- Reviewed researcher entries on datasets for accuracy and relevance
Global Terrorism Database
September 2020 - May 2021
Description
The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is the world’s most comprehensive, open-source terrorism database. It includes information on more than 190,000 terrorist attacks that have occurred worldwide since 1970. It provides a more complete understanding of the dynamics, causes and consequences of terrorism around the world, by allowing its users to analyze patterns such as the frequency of terrorist attacks, geo-spatial patterns of terrorist attacks, the lethality of terrorist attacks, patterns of casualties including injured persons and hostages, the emergence and prevalence of particular tactics and targeting strategies used in terrorist attacks, and the evolution of perpetrators of terrorist attacks.
Responsibilities
- Triage articles identifying new terrorist incidents to add to the database
The Arctic All-Hazards GIS Platform
September 2020 - January 2021
Description
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Arctic Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA) serves an important function for improving U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Arctic domain awareness. However, increased activity in the Arctic (particularly the U.S. Arctic Extended Economic Zone, or EEZ) demonstrates the need for an all-hazards approach centered on a next-generation geospatial platform capable of displaying, informing, and disseminating data to users from various communities (e.g., the public, non-governmental, state, local, tribal, and federal). This project seeks to provide a web application that matches the state-of-the-art in commercial geovisualization. The project team will work with stakeholders to design, develop, and implement a web-based geospatial tool in an ArcGIS Online format. The research goal is to minimize redundancy by providing an accessible application that meets stakeholder needs. The project team will test presently available options (e.g., ERMA) for user experience, interface, and design. Through creating Alpha and Beta versions, and testing with project stakeholders, the research team will discover areas of needed improvement in coding, display, and usability. The project will result in an Arctic web GIS application and that is driven by HQ and operational level USCG mission needs and requirements. This project blends basic research into cartographic design with the applied research of implementing a webGIS application that uses state-of-the-art technologies and methods and will be compliant with the DHS S&T prototype Integrated Maritime Domain Enterprise (IMDE). The application will be built within the Geospatial Information Infrastructure (GII) under the Geospatial Management Office (GMO) and the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) infrastructure and that it will align with existing requirements within HSIN and the GMO. A HSIN Community of Interest will be overseen by the project champion.
Responsibilities
- Designing user guide to teach stakeholders how to use the tool
- Incorporating feedback from stakeholders into updates for user guide
Integrated Discovery of Emerging and Novel Technologies (IDENT)
October 2019-December 2020
Description
The objective of this project is to develop sustainable and scalable integrated systems to discover emerging or disruptive technologies before they have an innovative impact on the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the countering-WMD (CWMD) mission space. Employing discovery methodologies will enable continuous horizon scanning, and drive technology forecast analysis and reporting to assist the CWMD community of interest (CoI) in avoiding technological surprise.
Responsibilities
- Automating interactions outreach with community of interest
Footnotes
The Road Less Traveled: Bolstering the Absorptive Capacity of Southern Central American States to Facilitate the Southern Flow of Northern Triangle Immigrants. ↩
Monitor and Mitigate the Impact of COVID-19 on Public Safety ↩
Datasets for Modeling and Mitigating Insider Risk (D-MInR)) ↩
Divergent Dimensions of Radicalization Risk: Migration and Violent Extremism in Sabah. ↩
Advancing U.S. CWMD/CWMT Capabilities in Support of the SIGMA+ Program through Development of Anticipatory Human Social Systems Models and Adversary Weapon Selection Decision Processes. ↩