Educating the Next Generation to Respond to a Bioterrorism Event

Abstract

Seamless, effective disaster management, including early warning, preparation, response, mitigation, and recovery, is necessary for resilient communities. As the scale and complexity of disasters increase, so do the information management, decision-making, and leadership challenges. This paper focuses on educating students through the application of systems engineering principles in a simulated bioterrorism event. We describe a workshop that included a tabletop scenario exercise to familiarize a mix of graduate, undergraduate, and high school students with systems analysis and decision making during real-world events. Bridging the data and information management and translation-to-knowledge functions through triage of information to create actionable information arguably represents the most critical and vulnerable link in the information fusion process. We conclude the paper with a description of the methodology used to evaluate the learning approach.