From the Director
by Jim Jones
I stepped into the CINA Director's role in January 2020, and we had barely settled in when the pandemic lockdown in March prompted a rethinking of almost everything we do. As the saying goes, change is inevitable, but what matters is how you handle it. So, we stepped back, looked at our mission and the circumstances, and asked "How can we do this - and do it well?"
The results speak for themselves: we pivoted online for our annual meeting, distinguished speaker series, and undertook extensive planning and production for the first virtual 2021 COE Summit, recruited two new full-time center staff (a Marketing and Events Coordinator and a Workforce Development and Education Program Director), initiated a Transition Advisory Board, launched an open RFP which generated 12 proposals and 3 new projects, created white papers and other content specific to the circumstances, and continued working with students, industry, and our MSI partners. I invite you to browse this report to get a sense of what CINA is about, the problems we are tackling, and the talented and dedicated people who are making it happen. 2020 was not exactly "business as usual," but then again, neither is our mission.
Our Mission
The CINA Center serves as a strategic innovation partner for Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE) stakeholders, enhancing their efforts to combat networked criminal activities. By concurrently pursuing scientific advancements and practice breakthroughs, CINA assists the HSE to better comprehend, anticipate and respond to challenges posed by evolving illicit operations. CINA also helps shape future HSE workforce that will excel in this complex operational landscape as it strives to protect our homeland.
Today, sophisticated criminal activities cross physical and cyber borders in their pursuit of illicit profit, devastating communities around the world, and wreaking havoc on societies and the environment. Such activities may take the form of:
- Drug trafficking
- Money laundering
- Human trafficking
- Organ and tissue trafficking
- Environmental crimes
- Smuggling of goods and counterfeits
- Illicit trading
Research Portfolio
The CINA center pursues a comprehensive set of programs and activities that are designed to equip practitioners, end users, decision makers, and U.S. policy makers in the homeland security enterprise with state-of-the-art knowledge, expertise, methods, tools, and technologies to help combat the growing threat of transnational crime.
While advances in information and communication technologies have benefited education, healthcare, and other crucial areas of society, transnational criminal operations have also taken advantage of technology to evolve, become more agile, and expand their scope. Today, transnational criminal networks can easily appear, disappear, and reorganize in response to operational opportunities and authority gaps.
Workforce Development and Outreach
The CINA Center pursues three categories of workforce and professional development activities related to its mission of disabling transnational criminal organizations. We strive to:
- Educate the future workforce: Develop integrative cross-disciplinary academic courses, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, that build upon existing programs in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and analytics. This curriculum will integrate findings from CINA research, and build upon connections with the homeland security professionals.
- Create professional development opportunities: Offer methods to strengthen the substantive, scientific, engineering, business, and analytical capabilities of the current homeland security workforce as they face diverse and novel transnational crime challenges.
- Improve workforce diversity: Focus on minority recruitment through innovative interaction with Minority Serving Institutions.