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Students impacting stadium and infrastructure security

Profiles of six students in multiple disciplines working toward better venue security

(Sept. 17, 2007)

Alison Culpen - A master of urban planning degree student at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, Culpen seeks to demonstrate how resources should be allocated to improve critical infrastructure. Her work has looked at energy and bridges as sites that are heavily used, vital to commerce and transportation, and may be in need of repair or restoration. She is a member of the NYU team that is a co-partner of the CREATE Center.

Trey Cunningham – Cunningham is a 2007 Ph.D. graduate of the Center for Spectator Sports Security Management at the University of Southern Mississippi. His dissertation looked at the knowledge levels of Division 1A athletic administrators relative to event and stadium security. A DHS SERRI Center alumnus, he is now a tenure-track faculty member at Northwestern State University in Louisiana, teaching courses in sports administration.

Justin Nosser – Having completed his master’s degree in 2007 at the School of Construction at the University of Southern Mississippi, Nosser focused on the development and implementation of a virtual-reality training tool for stadium security. Designed to equip football security personnel to neutralize threats, the tool uses a 3-d image of the M.M. Roberts Stadium at Southern Mississippi as its back-drop.

Zhihong Shen - A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California studying industrial and systems engineering, Shen is also a CREATE Center member. She writes, “The vehicle routing solution to emergencies I am developing in my research can be used for stadium or building infrastructure. It is able to treat the stadium or building infrastructure either as the sources/depots (start points) of the vehicle fleet, or it can treat the stadium or building as the destinations, where people are gathered for medical services.”

Ben Thompson - A DHS-funded Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Thompson is a member of CREATE. His building simulation tool views buildings as “systems of systems.” He seeks to revolutionize current renovation and construction standards, applying dynamic systems modeling to building design that reocgnize security and budget allocation.

Xianhang Zhang - A student at the University of Washington and member of the DHS RVAC Center, Zhang and colleagues Daniel Belcher and Ani Vijay are developing the Just-In-Time Command and Control Center (JITC3) as a computing-based approach to security. The JITC3 gives emergency responders a bird’s eye view of a location. Added to this are locations of response teams, and an understanding of how the event is unfolding in multiple locations.