Spring Break
URI awarded explosives research grant
Jeff Sullivan
Issue date: 10/23/08 Section: News
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This does not mean, however, resident students will be woken up by any explosions, other than the occasional football cannon.
Center Co-Director Jimmie Oxley stressed the center will not conduct on-site testing of explosive materials. Instead, the chemistry professor explained the center provides a great opportunity for students in many different majors to gain unique experience by doing research.
"There are 2.3 million jobs in homeland security-related fields," she said.
The Department of Homeland Security selected URI for the center after a rigorous and competitive selection process. The department started with 400 proposal entries, whittled them down to three and after another, much longer and more detailed proposal entry, chose URI for the grant.
Oxley said chemistry and forensics are not the only departments involved with the center. The center will research materials that could be made into a bomb. She said this is the area where the center has the most leeway to branch out to other disciplines, as this also entails detecting potential bombers as well as bombs.
"Homeland Security in general is very interested in what I would call the soft sciences," Oxley said. "They're interested in what you might call profiling, so all these folks in psychology may have a role to play."
She added it was this kind of "soft science" that led to the arrest of Steven Nobles. Last week, Nobles tried to bring a pipe bomb, along with fireworks and other weapons, onto an airplane headed for Las Vegas. She said it was certain characteristics about the man that led authorities to perform an additional security screening, in which they found the contraband.
"We're not doing that [yet, but] Homeland Security has groups [researching] that," Oxley said. "When we were making our proposal, we couldn't find a URI professor per se that was interested in working with us, but now that we've won the proposal we may find some [psychology professors]."
