CC* Planning: Undertaking a Process that will Create a Comprehensive Blueprint for Improving Cyber-Infrastructure at John Jay College, CUNY

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a senior college of the City University of New York that is both a Minority-Serving and a Hispanic-Serving Institution, is creating a comprehensive blueprint for improving cyber infrastructure to advance instruction, learning, and research in the critical areas of forensics, cyber security, and bioinformatics. An interdisciplinary team of faculty, research staff, and information technology professionals is convening to identify, enumerate, and prioritize the college’s cyberinfrastructure needs, and produce a blueprint for meeting them.

The goal of John Jay’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure planning initiative is to facilitate the development of a John Jay College Research Campus Cyber Infrastructure Resource Cluster.

This team is undertaking a comprehensive needs assessment focusing on the college’s overall management of cyberinfrastructure resources; requirements for hardware and high-performance computing; requirements for software, database, and simulation applications; applications specific to the college’s unique criminal justice focus; and professional development training needs for faculty, staff and students. This rigorous set of planning activities will produce an investment plan for an improved set of research computing resources to facilitate sophisticated faculty research across the disciplines.

It further ensures the continued competitiveness of John Jay students in computing-focused career fields, particularly within the justice and security realms. Project deliverables include a five-year cyberinfrastructure investment plan that forms the basis for future proposal submissions to the NSF MRI and CC* programs to seek partial support for implementation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.