Silver Appointed to Homeland Security Committee

APS Fellow and Charter Member Roxane Cohen Silver has been a regular face in Washington since 2003, when she was appointed to the Academe and Policy Research Senior Advisory Committee at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

This prestigious national panel advises the DHS Secretary on a broad range of issues, and Silver has capably briefed DHS staff on such topics as the psychological impact of terrorism and effective communication strategies during a crisis. The federal government has once again called upon Silver to share her expertise on national security, this time with the Secure Borders and Open Doors Advisory Committee (SBODAC).

This committee, recently created by the DHS and the State Department, includes experts from the tourism industry, health care, academia, and the private sector. Its goal is to provide advice and recommendations on efforts to maintain security while still ensuring that visitors to this country are made to feel welcome. One particular concern is the post-9/11 drop in foreign graduate student enrollment.

“The fact that there are so many academicians on the SBODAC suggests that DHS and the State Department recognize that universities are important stakeholders in the battle to keep our borders open yet secure,” Silver said.

Silver is professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, where she studies psychological and physiological reactions to stressful life events, including terrorist acts. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the U.S. Public Health Service. She recently completed a three-year national longitudinal study of responses to 9/11, and is now focusing on a NSF-funded collaboration to link psychological research on individual and group responses to traumatic life events with social science research on the security implications of global change and its effects on democracy.