Experts will discuss solutions today at UCLA to a prominent
issue facing the United States ““ protecting civil
infrastructures against natural, accidental and deliberate
threats.
The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
will host a symposium where specialists, such as government
officials and scientists, will discuss efficient ways to protect
the United States’ infrastructures.
“Engineers have always played an important role in
bringing innovation to society, through the industrial age to the
information age, and today this role has never been more
significant,” said Vijay Dhir, dean of the engineering
school.
Last year marked the first engineering school symposium, but
Dhir intends to make the event an annual tradition. Symposium
seminars help the community learn about current research and
UCLA’s contribution to the nation’s safety.
“One big goal is to make UCLA aware how academia can
protect our infrastructures, from a homeland security point of
view,” Dhir said.
Industry leaders from Boeing, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman will
first discuss a corporate perspective to homeland security and the
necessity of collaboration between the university and
industries.
UCLA professors, researchers and scientists will take the floor
to discuss technological developments in the crusade for protecting
civil infrastructures in the latter half of the symposium.
Director of the UCLA Homeland Security Technology Program,
William Kaiser, said departments other than engineering heavily
influence developing research for homeland security as well.
“The area of homeland security is probably the most
multi-disciplinary research challenge that has ever faced the
engineering science community,” Kaiser said.
UCLA works closely with research centers like the Center for
Embedded Networked Sensing and the Institute for Cell Mimetic Space
Exploration, and is at the heart of research for creating
technologies in protecting civil infrastructures.
Though safeguarding civil infrastructures is a fairly new field,
Kaiser feels “confident that UCLA will remain elite in this
area.”