NCITE IS ONE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY’S NEWEST CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE The Department of Homeland Security’s top counterterrorism and intelligence official messaged UNO’s Gina Ligon with an urgent request. John Cohen, who leads DHS’s Intelligence and Analysis unit and serves as DHS coordinator for counterterrorism, was meeting with his French government counterparts to discuss disinformation online. What could Ligon, who runs a DHS-funded academic consortium on counterterrorism housed at UNO’s College of Business Administration, tell him about what the French were doing about the growing threat of disinformation? It was Friday. Cohen’s meeting was Monday. Ligon sprung to action. An industrial-organizational psychologist who is also a management professor at CBA had won the largest federal grant in the NU system’s history in 2020 to start this counterterrorism research center. She doesn’t exactly sit around. Ligon tapped Nathan Dufour, a French-speaking doctoral student in criminology, and the two spent the weekend on a footnoted report leading with this item: Frenchlanguage disinformation is six times more likely to be shared online than factually accurate news. Despite the fact that both Ligon and Dufour had lost power during one of the worst summer storms to hit Omaha — hurricane-force winds knocked out electricity to a record number of residents — they were able to complete the request and get it to Cohen by Sunday. His response: “This is extraordinarily helpful. Thank you.”
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UNO BUSINESS
This is a small example of the role the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center plays for the federal government. Launched mid-pandemic last year, NCITE is one of the Department of Homeland Security’s newest Centers of Excellence, an academic consortium focused on terrorism and targeted violence prevention. DHS has about 10 such centers, each focused on a different national threat. The DHS center for terrorism and targeted violence had been based at the University of Maryland. UNO, however, won the 10-year, $36.5 million federal grant to create a research center right here. It is housed at CBA and is run through the Center for Collaboration Science, which is overseen by the Office of Research and Creative Activity. One might wonder what a terrorism research center is doing in a business school. Doug Derrick, NCITE director of innovation and transition, offered two reasons. First, the nature of NCITE’s applied research dovetails with how business colleges stress the importance of getting research out of notebooks and into the hands of users. NCITE’s mission is to make its research ready and available to DHS and other law enforcement and prevention practitioners. Second, a business college’s emphasis on measurement is another important reason. “You need to be able to measure the impact,” said Derrick, an IT Innovation professor and principal investigator on an NCITE education project. “If you’re going to objectively say, ‘We’ve made something better,’ you have to have data. And no one is as experienced or good at that as business schools. Business schools measure everything: return on investment, bottom line.” The NCITE Center has broad reach, collaborating with about 50 researchers at 18 academic institutions including UNO. The consortium includes Stanford and George Washington Universities as well as international partner, King’s College London. Researchers from the University of Nebraska Medical Center and University of Nebraska-Lincoln also contribute.
