The Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense (CBTS) Center of Excellence at Texas A&M University (TAMU), sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), held its Annual Meeting this Tuesday, May 25th. This event, which took place virtually, aimed to update the Homeland Security Enterprise on the progress of its research and workforce development projects.

As part of the meeting’s agenda, Dr. Zenon Medina-Cetina, Associate Professor and holder of the Zachry Career Development Professorship II in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at TAMU, presented research from two projects sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering of Weapons of Mass Destruction Office (CWMD), based on the use of a Bayesian Geo-Risk framework applied to U.S. Supply Chains involved in international trade.

The projects, titled R-7: Model Development for Risks posed by COVID-19 on U.S. Trade Supply Chains and R-13: U.S.-Mexico Risk Taskforce to Support the Health Supply Chain Systems, comprise diverse, multinational, multidisciplinary teams working to diagnose, assess and mitigate the most relevant impacts posed by COVID-19 to the supply chain infrastructure in the U.S. and its international partners, and in the case of R-13, Mexico specifically.

Dr. Matt Cochran, Research Director at CBTS, highlighted the importance of these projects for the Center of Excellence. “At the outset of this Center of Excellence we thought it was important to incorporate a well-founded comprehensive risk methodology within the center and as the way to characterize risk across projects; we also recognized the need to capture data—not just treat every project as a one-off, but to comprehensively and in sequence throughout the Center’s existence, build data and collect that evidence,” he concluded, before introducing Dr. Zenon Medina-Cetina’s presentation.

In Dr. Medina-Cetina’s words, the projects “involved contributions by more than forty researchers from different countries, government agencies, industry and academic institutions, adding to the development of Bayesian Geo-Risk inference tools to improve decision-making on the impact of COVID-19 and other converging threats on international U.S. supply chains.”

After Dr. Medina-Cetina’s presentation, Dr. Ivan Zapata, Global Health Security Advisor at the DHS Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office noted the projects’ usefulness, mentioning even that he has used R-13 to answer some of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s questions concerning Title 19 (regarding customs duties), Title 42 (regarding communicable disease) and the reopening of the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico. He went on to add that DHS is trying to carry out science-based decision-making, as well as incorporate data to assist in policy making, further underlining the value of projects such as these.

The Bayesian Statistics and Risk Analysis part of the session concluded with both Dr. Medina-Cetina and Dr. Cochran’s remarks regarding the value of the extensive involvement of graduate and undergraduate students; Dr. Medina-Cetina also expressed his wish to have the project continue growing, saying the framework can expand its coverage so that information can be provided regarding the state of risk of any supply chain in the world that has some interaction with the US.

Find out more about projects R-7 and R-13 in the videos below, created by Dr. Medina-Cetina’s Stochastic Geomechanics Lab Coordinator, Ms. Araceli Lopez-Acosta.

R-7: Model Development for Risks posed by COVID-19 on U.S. Trade Supply Chains

R-13: U.S.-Mexico Risk Taskforce to Support the Health Supply Chain Systems

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