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Abstract
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are delivering science and technology for homeland security by connecting with stakeholders to understand their needs in the field, researching and assessing emerging technology to close gaps, and building collaborative partnerships to create and deploy tools and capabilities fit for emerging and enduring threats. A beacon of research, outreach, and collaboration, the Department of Energy national laboratories represent an often lesser-known resource to help deliver science and technology to serve the homeland security mission. This essay highlights a novel approach to assessing the threat landscape, eliciting and integrating end-user feedback into solutions, and ultimately sharing findings, lessons learned, and best practices with practitioners. Recent research and stakeholder engagement have showcased the range of practitioner needs in the field, and researchers at PNNL are taking a deep dive into exploring how emerging technology, particularly artificial intelligence, poses both challenges and opportunities to transform the future of emergency response and the public safety community.
Overview
The threat landscape is vast and constantly changing, and so is the technology to address it. Protecting homeland security—our critical infrastructure, our communities, our air, land, and maritime borders, and everything in between—requires innovation at a pace and scale not previously achievable. At the forefront of this race are Department of Energy national laboratories like Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where scientists are delivering world-class research and development (R&D) and collaborative partnerships to tackle emerging and enduring threats. This essay highlights a novel approach to assess the threat landscape, elicit and drive end-user feedback into solutions, and ultimately share findings, lessons learned, and best practices with practitioners. With a culture founded in research and collaboration, PNNL and other national laboratories represent an often lesser-known resource to deliver science and technology to serve the homeland security mission.
Understanding the Threat Landscape and Technology Needs
The wealth of R&D in progress to define homeland security threats and create solutions is astounding—research institutions worldwide want to understand the challenges and inform science and technology that makes a difference. At PNNL, we have long set our research sights on protecting first responders and the public safety community. A key first step to understanding this mission, just like any scientific mission, is to assess the current landscape: what R&D is in progress, what are the needs we hear from practitioners in the field, and where can we partner or conduct new R&D to fill the gaps?
To do this, we have conducted various landscape assessments into first responder technology, emerging capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI), emergency operations centers, and other homeland security R&D, filtering thousands of journal articles, websites, tech media, reports, and other publications into manageable datasets of peer-reviewed and open-source publications. These assessments help define current capability needs among communities of practice as well as identify both R&D in progress and existing gaps where national laboratories or others may have an impact.
As an example, at the onset of wearable devices and novel sensors in the early 2010s, we scoured the technology landscape and produced a series of reports highlighting technologies with the potential for use by first responders. We regularly partner with our homeland security sponsors and first responders to conduct assessments of commercial products for potential use in the field, and, where products miss the mark, we explore what R&D might help close the gap in the future. These and other similar product guides and operational field assessments can provide useful information about available technologies to help first responders make informed decisions about technology procurement and use. These efforts also provide valuable feedback for technology developers.
Similarly, to better understand first responder capability needs, we review key homeland security reports and publications, including lists and needs from the First Responder Resource Group Project Responder, International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation, Interagency Board, and other leading organizations. In 2023, analysis of the top priorities in these lists revealed common themes and enduring capability needs over the last 20 years. We vetted and iterated on the findings with first responders from across the nation, prioritizing dozens of capability needs to just a few and, where possible, identified existing technologies that might be applicable to remaining capability needs. We crosswalked their feedback across disciplines and regions to identify commonalities and differences in needs, and ultimately transformed these results into individual R&D roadmaps for addressing the capability needs in the area of audio communications, intuitive alerts, data interoperability, and AI assurance. Upon publication, these resources will be shared with the first responder community to inform potential R&D and investment in the future.
An underlying current of recent R&D is how AI poses both promise and peril to all these needs. Powerful AI tools have proliferated industry and are rapidly transforming the workplace, and now is the time to understand how to leverage AI to support the rapidly changing concerns. To that end, our researchers dug deeper into a targeted review of applied AI and emergency management and public safety (EM/PS), curating a set of technologies and research areas that have a high probability of enhancing EM/PS in the next decade, including (but not limited to):
- Public-Facing AI Communication
- AI-Filtered Domain Awareness
- AI-Enabled Disaster Prediction and Detection
- AI-Enabled Recovery Prediction
- Risk Models for Optimal Asset Deployment
- Modeling, Simulation, and Digital Twins
Together, the results of our landscape assessments and other targeted research, such as tech scanning, market assessments, and literature reviews, shape our outreach to practitioners to elicit their feedback on vetted areas of need where new or existing R&D and technology might present opportunities.
Engaging with Stakeholders on Emerging Technology
From AI and automation to advanced imaging and data analytics, emerging technology presents great opportunities but also great barriers to adoption. This is why stakeholder and specifically end-user engagement is a key input to productive R&D; we hear it when first responders tell us they do not need another widget nor will their budgets accommodate another whiz-bang bright idea. Delivering solutions that fit—solutions that are adoptable, interoperable, cost-effective, and secure—requires connecting across stakeholder communities to better understand both current and near-future needs.
Armed with R&D and technology landscape assessments, we vet our findings with a wide range of stakeholders, including our sponsors such as the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate as well as emergency managers, first responders, university partners, professional organizations or communities of interest, our own national laboratory researchers, and federal staff. We connect nationwide both virtually and in person through interviews, ideation and visioning workshops, focus groups, surveys, and conference panels to understand the concerns, barriers, and opportunities for technology. These efforts continuously evolve our understanding of the current state of R&D and technology needs, and we translate that into useful information to inform future research.
For example, technology is a challenging opportunity space for homeland security operations as emerging technology often poses both benefits and barriers to adoption, and we see that more than ever with AI. AI can help us advance from data overload to prediction and real-time, data-driven, decision making. With today’s tools, we can generate an overwhelming amount of data, but practitioners need to be able to access and use it—and quickly. The best way to understand how emerging technology like AI is impacting, or could impact, operations is to talk to the people who use them and crosswalk that with the latest research and technology trends.
To do this, our researchers regularly conduct scenario-focused engagements with emergency operations centers across the nation to engage operational stakeholders in real-world scenarios to evaluate the potential impacts of new technologies on operations. Our teams have connected with multiple cities and their EM/PS teams, including Seattle, Washington; Boulder, Colorado; and Nashua, New Hampshire, among others. These types of opportunities are only made possible thanks to positive relationships with cities’ emergency managers and their passion for keeping up to date on emerging technology and its potential to impact their operations and, ultimately, their communities. This outreach has identified foundational concepts for current needs, and participants’ feedback provided an enhanced vision for an emergency operation center of the future. Their feedback also informed technology profiles that can act as recommendations for future research as well as a starting point for collaboration with private industry for commercial technology solutions.
University partnerships also present an opportunity to engage the next generation of practitioners and academics, engaging students to think boldly about emerging challenges. For example, we partnered with the University of Albany College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity faculty and EM/PS stakeholders from state agencies and city departments to discuss the 13 technologies from the AI research landscape assessment. The hackathon-style “sandpit” exercise invited University of Albany and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student teams to develop ideas built on machine learning technologies to address the challenges faced by an emergency operations center (Nolan, 2024). Opportunities like this invite a fresh perspective to explore how emerging tech like AI can make a difference to practitioners’ grand challenges.
By engaging with the community, we learn what the real needs are and provide information on the tools in development to meet those needs. This ensures our work remains relevant and can be easily adopted or deployed for operational impact.
Building Partnerships with Trust and Impact
At PNNL, we have a long-standing history of partnering in our region and across the nation to close the gap between emerging threats and challenges and science and technology solutions. In fact, it was the impetus for our Northwest Regional Technology Center (NWRTC). Launched in 2008 with encouragement from the Washington State Adjutant General and as a stretch goal from our homeland security sponsor, NWRTC was established to bridge the need for unbiased technical support at the state and local level with technology development efforts. The center’s approach is simple but powerful: We connect science and technology with needs in preparedness, resiliency, response, and recovery. Our teams work with regional EM/PS professionals and the private sector to:
- Define and prioritize technology needs.
- Coordinate and lead regional efforts to test, demonstrate, and deploy new and emerging technologies.
- Conduct forums focusing on prevention and emergency preparedness, response, and recovery.
- Provide information and expertise on new and emerging technologies, including AI, vapor or fentanyl detection, and advanced imaging and analytics.
We have put real focus on connecting with homeland security partners and practitioners, and it’s paid off in the form of technology pilots, operational field assessments, regional workshops, and more. For example, a partnership with a local event venue’s security resulted in the deployment of the Guardian Immersive Imaging System for enhanced security. The system provides up to a 360-degree view of high-resolution video for security operators, training, and other tactical applications. With this technology, pan-tilt-zoom is done digitally, allowing operators to view multiple points of interest, while still capturing and recording the full field of view. The award-winning technology was licensed to Consolidated Resource Imaging, LLC and can be custom configured to provide a 90- to 360-degree area of coverage, depending on the installation location. The system has generated significant interest in the technology for other spaces and events where advanced imaging and analytics can bolster public safety in crowded places.
Similarly, partnering with local transportation partners resulted in the deployment of risk assessment modeling tools, such as our award-winning Airport Risk Assessment Model (ARAM), into operational environments, including several airports and transportation hubs. The tools dynamically compute system risk over time to determine how to best allocate security resources. The tools quickly calculate the needs and best assignment of assets—security personnel, security scanners, and other countermeasures—that work together in innumerable combinations to keep passengers and transportation hubs like airports and ports safe. The easy-to-use, web-based tools recommend where to best deploy security assets on an hourly basis. Our teams continue to demonstrate this award-winning technology to potential collaborators for additional use cases and improvements.
We hear regularly from our collaborators about the benefit our outreach and sharing of technology needs and opportunities has to our community. Across all domains—air, land, sea, cyber—the center serves as a primary resource for working with first responders, emergency management, public safety professionals, academia, and the private sector to define and prioritize technology needs. Over the years, we’ve brought regional stakeholders together to address a wide range of topics. For example, workshops in the early 2000s convened regional partners around threats such as recovery and restoration of urban areas, military installations, and critical infrastructure following the aerosol release of a biological agent (PNNL et al, 2010) and solutions to reduce the time and resources required to recover wide urban areas, military installations, and other critical infrastructures following a catastrophic chemical, biological, or radiological incident (Wide Area Recovery and Resiliency Program, 2012). We heard from collaborators that they called on these frameworks at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
We’ve also held a number of cybersecurity- and critical infrastructure-focused summits in recent years. Most recently, we convened 40 key decision makers and stakeholders from across the state to discuss strategies and pilot a collaborative approach to improve cyber incident response readiness within Washington State. In small working groups, participants shared incident response lessons learned, best practices, and opportunities for improvement within the water and transportation sectors. The summit outlined common areas of opportunity and next steps (Lesperance et al., 2021) to advance sector-specific cyber incident response planning within Washington State.
Unfortunately, partnerships rely on reputation, and Department of Energy national laboratories are often a lesser-known resource in the research-to-operations continuum. That is why we regularly share with stakeholders how national laboratories like PNNL and other national laboratories represent one of the most comprehensive research systems of its kind. We perform research for government agencies, universities, and industry partners to deliver breakthrough science to meet national needs. PNNL is celebrating its 60-year anniversary in 2025, and in that time we have served a variety of missions and national security capabilities to address homeland security challenges. Specifically, the events of September 11, 2001, called on our science and technology advancements to improve the safety and security of our nation. In the decades since, PNNL has enabled a wide range of R&D in the areas of aviation, radiation, biological and chemical detection, and public safety (PNNL, 2021).
Today, our scientists and engineers provide key input to technical visioning and near- and long-term research agendas. This scientific expertise addresses both strategic and tactical needs while preparing for the evolving technology and threat landscape. This expertise also aids the assessment of emerging technologies and threats. Our homeland security partners face vast technical challenges that require a community of academic, industrial, federal government, and national laboratory collaborators who have a detailed understanding of the mission, are flexible and responsive, and can self-organize. This collaboration fosters peer review and best-in-breed efforts and expands the ability to leverage federal, private, and international investments. If you have a need, our NWRTC team and our laboratory are just a phone call away.
Sharing Results with Practitioners
None of this work matters if results don’t get to the people who need it: the first responders on the front lines of keeping us safe, government sponsors who can fund R&D to close capability gaps, and industry partners who can commercialize our emergent capabilities and get them into the hands of practitioners. That is why communication and outreach transcend every aspect of our R&D and partnership approach. Our work cannot survive in a vacuum, so our researchers hit the pavement to connect with practitioners.
We routinely share scientific advances with industry, other government agencies, academia, and colleagues to broaden impact and get our tools and capabilities into the hands of practitioners. For example, our Rapid Analytics for Disaster Response tool has been used to assess flooding damage to utility assets in the aftermath of several hurricanes and has been demonstrated to potential end users nationwide, including the World Fire Congress. Our Electrical Grid Resilience and Assessment System has played a vital role in helping Puerto Rican emergency personnel plan for severe weather events. We also connect our tech with industry through commercialization and licensing. Most recently, we licensed our VaporID technology to BaySpec Inc (Rickey, 2025), who transformed it into a more portable form factor. The technology, which can detect trace levels of fentanyl, cocaine, explosives, and other harmful substances through the air, was demonstrated to Customs and Border Protection in a test at the U.S. border crossing between Mexico and Nogales, Arizona.
We also present at national conferences and to professional organizations, and bring our private and public partners with us to deliver a varied, multidisciplinary, and multi-jurisdictional perspective. Our teams have shared our AI and EM/PS R&D at numerous events in recent years, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference, National Homeland Security Conference, International Association for Emergency Managers Annual Conference, the National Emergency Management Association Annual Forum, and state emergency management conferences in Alaska, Texas, and Washington. Most recently, our team was invited to co-present on a panel at the Texas Department of Emergency Management Annual Conference (Jaraysi, 2025). The panel focused on the relationship and intersection of AI, first responders, and EM/PS in the wake of the crucial impact AI is having across various industries. Similarly, several of our researchers presented on our AI and homeland security R&D at the 2025 Department of Homeland Security Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Summit (Disney, 2025a). These events present an unmatched opportunity to not just share what we’re learning through R&D but also connect with practitioners in person on their needs.
We also publish in peer-reviewed and industry-renowned journals—like Homeland Security Today—and our researchers serve on multiple editorial boards and professional organizations. These channels present an opportunity to not just share R&D but also promote lessons learned and best practices in an industry where word of mouth, sharing practitioner to practitioner, is often king. We also publish a bi-monthly newsletter collating and sharing news from around the homeland security community. We welcome subscribers and submissions of stories and upcoming events to share with our network of hundreds of practitioners, researchers, and collaborators nationwide. Our NWRTC website also houses a library of our homeland security and first responder publications and projects.
Lastly, we regularly welcome guests—including first responders, emergency managers, industry partners, and sponsors alike—to visit our campuses in Richland, Seattle, and Sequim, Washington (one of the Department of Energy’s only marine research facilities) and observe our science and technology in action. Our campus is home to numerous facilities and testbeds fit for testing, evaluating, and enhancing capabilities for our homeland security missions. For example, the Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center is a ready resource for research, development, and testing technologies to improve power grid management. The center is available to utilities, vendors, government agencies, and universities interested in research, development, or training. Similarly, the Control Environment and Laboratory Resource provides realistic, small-scale replicas of maritime ports and other environments for government and private industry partners to experience and learn how to mitigate the possible effects of a cyberattack. The platforms were recently used in a high-stakes training exercise by the U.S. Coast Guard (Disney, 2025b).
Whether it’s meeting one-on-one with practitioners, hosting workshops convening regional leaders, or publishing and presenting to our peers, partnerships and impact happen in all shapes and sizes. In today’s landscape of rapid-paced change and technological revolution, national laboratories like PNNL represent a powerful conduit for connecting science and technology to emerging threats. Our lines of communication are open to hearing technology needs from the field and seeing where we can leverage our talent, test beds, facilities, and tools to tackle tough challenges. Whether it’s AI today or some future technology yet to be envisioned, the national laboratories will be at the forefront of identifying the threats of tomorrow and delivering solutions to mitigate those threats.
References
Disney, M. (2025, August 6). Coast Guard cyber team trains with PNNL tech: Simulations model critical infrastructure attacks. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. https://www.pnnl.gov/publications/coast-guard-cyber-team-trains-pnnl-tech
Disney, M. (2025, August 26). Summit showcases partnerships, tech for homeland security: Researchers share advances in AI, cybersecurity, and digital twins. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/summit-showcases-partnerships-tech-homeland-security
Jaraysi, N. (2025, July 2). Barr speaks on AI at Texas Emergency Management Conference: Jonathan Barr was invited to co-present on the intersection of AI and emergency management. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/barr-speaks-ai-texas-emergency-management-conference
Lesperance, A., Godwin, S., Ayala, K., Disney, M., & McLaughlin, R. (2022). Washington State Cyber Incident Response Summit: Summary report from the September 7–8, 2022 workshop held at Camp Murray, Washington. https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL-33605_WA_Cyber_Incident_Response_Summit_Report.pdf
Nolan, M. (2024, April 2). CEHC Artificial Intelligence Competition offers cash prizes to student teams. University at Albany News. https://www.albany.edu/news-center/news/2024-cehc-artificial-intelligence-competition-offers-cash-prizes-student-teams
PNNL, King County Office of Emergency Management, City of Seattle Office of Emergency Management, Pierce County Office of Emergency Management, City of Bellevue Emergency Preparedness Division, & Joint Base Lewis-McChord. (2010). Regional recovery after a biological attack: Workshop insights and recommendations. https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/RegionalRecoveryBioAttack201009_0.pdf
PNNL. (2021). Building a science and technology legacy in homeland security. https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/NSD_1174_911-20thAnniversary-Timeline-FINAL.pdf
Rickey, T. (2025, June 24). Chemists develop contactless system to detect fentanyl, other drugs: Results from demonstration at U.S. border facility include detection of cocaine, additional narcotics. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/chemists-develop-contactless-system-detect-fentanyl-other-drugs
Wide Area Recovery and Resiliency Program. (2012). Denver UASI all-hazards regional recovery framework. https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Denver%20UASI%20Framework-Annexes.pdf