MIST: What is your background before you came to Penn State and got involved with SRA (Security Risk and Analysis)?

Professor Graham: Prior to teaching SRA I was a career Marine Corps officer. I retired in July of 2007 and my family and I relocated to State College. In seeking employment with Penn State, my first inclination was to look for a job in the Athletic Department. As a former squadron and airbase commander, I thought my experience in managing people and facilities could be put to use managing one of PSU’s many athletic venues. However, my background in strategic planning and my interest in National Security and terrorism studies in particular brought me to IST instead. The SRA major was a good fit to my background and interest. I believe that my military training was the perfect primer for teaching in the SRA major. My background in strategic and tactical planning, targeting and operations can be directly translated to the study of terrorism and terrorism networks.

MIST: What aspects of this industry (SRA) capture your interest and why?

PG: I believe the Global War of Terrorism (GWOT) will continue to threaten U.S. values and quality of life well into the future; the issues of terrorism will be inherited by our children and their children. I feel I have a responsibility to raise the awareness of the issues surrounding this problem in order to better prepare our youth to understand it and continue the fight; our Nation’s freedoms, values and way of life are at stake. To effectively engage GWOT we must understand what is at stake from both sides of the issue. To do this, we must consider the terrorist point of view as well as our own; what motivates them, and what threatens them. We must also understand the delicate balance between security and civil liberty.

MIST: What classes have you taught or currently teaching and how have you shaped the curriculum to incorporate hands-on activities and real life experiences?

PG: I am currently teaching SRA 211, “The Threat of Terrorism and Crime.” This course was designed to provide the first and second year student a broad exposure to the issues facing society with regard to crime and terrorism. I believe it to be a well thought out curriculum with enough exposure to key aspects of terrorism and crime to pique student interest and promote a more in depth study of this body of work. My efforts to infuse my experience into the course material include the insertion of what I call a “unifying thread,” critical thinking. By incorporating techniques and procedures that I have been exposed to during my military career such as the planning process, intelligence analytics and bias detection; I hope to unify the course material by re-enforcing various critical thinking methodologies. I hope to accomplish this through hands-on exercises and group interaction scenarios that directly support the course material as it is rolled out throughout the course. During my initial military flight training I was exposed to the learning process of “introduction- review- practice and evaluation,” which I adapted for use when I became a flight instructor and further adapted its use in other disciplines throughout the remainder of my career.

MIST: Are you involved in any research? If so, what and how can students get involved with such opportunities, if it interests them?

PG: I am a member of the Center for Net-Centric Cognition and Information Fusion or NC2IF. The center has been operating within IST since July 2007, but was formally designated in December of 2007. Dr. Dave Hall is the Center Director, brain trust and founder; I serve as his Center Deputy. The center has three major thrust areas, which are: Academics, Research and Demonstration. We are currently funded through various grants, including the Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Lockheed Martin and others. As our name suggests, we are interested in the issues surrounding data fusion, but really our research is much broader than that. Our research includes the harnessing of diverse types of data, filtering it, analyzing it and presenting it to decision-makers across a variety of problem sets and scales. The center is enhanced by the participation of many students who are conducting research, constructing model and are actively involved in designing and conducting experiments. Students who are interested in data fusion and applied research topics should contact either Dave or I to explore the possibilities.

MIST: Do you have any plans or ideas to help build the SRA major in the future to help prepare students for real life scenarios?

PG: I am currently developing a Red-Cell verses Blue-Cell scenario, which I plan to unveil during the second half of the semester. Students will be formed into Inter-agency teams and will utilize analytical methods learned in class in order to attempt to identify the criminal/terrorist elements, piece together the threat plot and make recommendations to mitigate or stop the terrorist event from happening. The scenario will draw on the subject matter introduced throughout the course (both criminal and terrorist), and draw on student experiences in problem identification, critical thinking and analysis to find and stop the criminal/terrorist enterprise.