Center: SECURE - Collaborative Research Security & Integrity National Environment

With this award supported by the Office of the Chief of Research Security, Strategy & Policy (OCRSSP), the U.S. National Science Foundation establishes the SECURE (Safeguarding the Entire Community of the U.S. Research Ecosystem) Center to help the research community mitigate foreign threats to the security and integrity of the U.S. research enterprise.

International collaboration is a vital part of the culture and success of the US research enterprise and is highly valued by researchers. To support these researchers and their home institutions, and to foster a balanced approach to mitigating risk, the University of Washington (UW) will host the National SECURE Center. The National Center will support and be supported by experts from a dozen partner organizations in five regional centers across the country.

Regional centers are better known by researchers in their region, which increases participation and trust. Participation will be critical to SECURE Center's success since it will use expert-guided participatory design to develop its services. In participatory design, community members work hand-in-hand with the Center's experts, designers & developers.

Experts guide community members to identify tools & services that will help the community address pressing research security concerns. Designers and developers then create those tools for the community to use and refine. The SECURE Center will be "Community Designed, Community Used, Community Improved." In addition to tools, SECURE Center will gather or develop and share best practices, training, analyses, and more.

Through these activities, SECURE Center will help researchers make risk-informed decisions to safeguard ongoing and future research activities.

Research security is an ongoing concern. To support the research community in combating malign foreign influence, this project establishes a non-governmental research security organization, named the SECURE (Safeguarding the Entire Community of the U.S. Research Ecosystem) Center.

The SECURE Center will be a bridge between the research community and government funding agencies. Representatives from these agencies comprise the U.S. Government Steering Committee (USG SC), which is chaired by NSF.

The USG SC will advise NSF on research security issues that may impact the work of SECURE Center, make NSF aware of new information that may be relevant to SECURE Center's mission, and coordinate the declassification of information to be shared by NSF with SECURE Center for ultimate dissemination to the U.S. research community. The research community will provide guidance on the Center's internal operations, policies, vision, and direction through the Advisory Board, which is chaired by a national security expert, and composed of community representatives from the spectrum of organizations that the SECURE Center will serve.

The National SECURE Center is led by the University of Washington (UW)'s Center on Collaborative Systems for Security, Safety, and Resilience (CoSSAR) in collaboration with nine additional institutions of higher education (IHEs) & three private sector organizations. Six IHEs will lead five regional centers:

- SECURE Northeast -- Northeastern University - SECURE Southeast -- Emory University - SECURE Midwest -- University of Missouri - SECURE Southwest -- University of Texas San Antonio and Texas A&M University - SECURE West -- University of Washington

Mississippi State University, the University of Michigan, and Stanford's Hoover Institution will provide critical subject matter expertise on sensitive research, threat types, geopolitical analysis, and international cooperation. The College of Charleston will lead efforts to include emerging and minority-serving institutions (ERIs & MSIs) in SECURE's activities; the University of Michigan will ensure that SECURE's services balance the need for collaboration with the need for protection.

Impulsion Consulting, Insight Global, and MindCette will provide additional expertise to the Center as it undertakes a powerful, proven, participatory design process to co-create the SECURE Shared Virtual Environment (SVE) and its suite of offerings. As the first of its kind, SECURE SVE will link members of the U.S. research community from IHEs, non-profits, and small- & medium-sized businesses in a safe, trustworthy platform to share ideas, needs, and information on research security.

Trust will also be fostered through five regional centers, which will facilitate co-creation under the guidance of the National Center. This approach ensures that co-creation is relevant to organizations that may exist in vastly different geographic, administrative, and socioeconomic contexts while simultaneously leveraging the design and development capabilities of UW's CoSSAR.

This structure also elevates regional concerns to a national level where organizations may discover that their challenges are similar in unexpected ways, paving the way for solutions that might not otherwise be conceived. The SECURE Center will be "Community Designed, Community Used, Community Improved," designing a suite of solutions will include but is not limited to shared tools, best practices, training, analyses, and other information, all delivered through SECURE SVE to assist the research community in making decisions regarding their research activities in the context of malign foreign threats.

Additionally, the SECURE Center will build capacity in participatory design that may have the power to transform the way other challenging issues, such as administrative capacity to secure and manage federal research funding at ERIs & MSIs, are addressed.

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.