Brian Jenkins is a senior advisor to the president of the RAND Corporation and one of the world's leading authorities on terrorism. He founded the RAND Corporation's terrorism research program in 1972, has written frequently on terrorism, and has served as an advisor to the federal government and the private sector on the subject. A former Army captain who served with Special Forces in Vietnam, he is also a former deputy chairman of Kroll Associates. He served as a captain in the Green Berets in the Dominican Republic and later in Vietnam (1966-1970). In 1996, he was appointed by President Clinton to be a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. He has served as an advisor to the National Commission on Terrorism (1999-2000) and in 2000 was appointed as a member of the U.S. Comptroller General's Advisory Board. He is Is also a special advisor to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and a member of the board of directors of the ICC's Commercial Crime Services. He is the author of International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict, the editor and coauthor of Terrorism and Personal Protection, coeditor and coauthor of Aviation Terrorism and Security, and coauthor of The Fall of South Vietnam.

Professor Andrew Mack is the Director of the Human Security Centre at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. Prior to establishing the Human Security Centre, he was a Visiting Professor at the Program on Humanitarian Policy at Harvard University (2001) and spent two and a half years as the Director of Strategic Planning in the Executive Office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the United Nations (1998-2001).

Professor Mack has held the Chair in International Relations at the Institute of Advanced Study at the Australian National University (1991-1998), was the Director of the ANU's Peace Research Centre (1985-91) and was the ANU's Senior Research Fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (1984-85).

He has held research and teaching positions at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia) the London School of Economics, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, the Richardson Institute for Peace and Conflict Research, University of California at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Fudan University in Shanghai and the International University of Japan.

His pre-academic career included six years in the Royal Air Force (engineer and pilot); two and a half years in Antarctica as meteorologist and Deputy Base Commander; a year as a diamond prospector in Sierra Leone and two years with the BBC's World Service producing the current affairs program "The World Today".

Jeffrey R. Cooper is an SAIC Technical Fellow, Vice President for Technology, and Chief Science Officer of SAIC Strategies, Simulation & Training Business Unit at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He received his undergraduate and graduate education at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was later Professorial Lecturer in Arms Control and Defense Analysis at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In addition to long-standing focus on strategic analysis and military transformation, his core interest is using information to improve intelligence analysis, decision making, C2, and operational effectiveness in order to enhance U.S. national security. Cooper served in a range of senior government positions, including White House Staff and Assistant to the Secretary of Energy.

For the past several years, Cooper's focus has been largely on intelligence matters, with particular emphasis on analytic failures and methods to improve all-source analysis capabilities. Most recently, he chaired the Panel on Unexpected Threats for the DNI's Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR). Cooper was a Professional Staff Member of the Presidential Commission on Future Intelligence Capabilities (Silberman-Robb Commission) and has been actively involved in work on the Revolution in Intelligence Affairs and Intelligence Transformation. His monograph on "Curing Analytic Pathologies" will be published shortly by CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.

For almost 20 years the Energy Department has been investigating and developing Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the site for a deep underground repository to accept spent fuel from all the power reactors and high level waste left over from bomb programs. The future of US nuclear energy is widely thought to be tied to the success of the project. In 2002 Congress gave DOE the green light to take the next step to submit an NRC license application demonstrating compliance with applicable standards. DOE promised such an application in December 2004. It delayed and delayed and now DOE no longer has a date for submitting an NRC application, but it will be no earlier than 2008.

What's holding it up? What is the history of the project? What are its technical and managerial and legal problems? What has been the effect of Nevada's opposition? How will recent project changes and the administration's new nuclear policy (GNEP) affect Yucca Mountain? What are the prospects for project licensing and completion? Is Yucca Mountain the only option for dealing with the country's spent fuel?

Dr. Victor Gilinsky is a Washington, D.C.-based consultant on energy. He has been active on proliferation issues for many years, going back to his early work at RAND in Santa Monica, California. He joined RAND soon after receiving a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1961. In 1971 he moved to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C., where he was assistant director for policy and program review. From 1973 to 1975, he was head of the RAND Physical Sciences Department. From 1975 to 1984, he served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), having been appointed by President Gerald Ford and reappointed by President Jimmy Carter. During his NRC tenure, Dr Gilinsky was heavily involved in nuclear-export issues. In 1982 he received Caltech's Distinguished Alumnus Award.

One of the fundamental challenges facing the United States Department of Homeland Security is the determination of what is critical in critical infrastructure systems such as water, Internet, power, energy, and transportation. Current practice is focused on single-point security audits of things like power plants, airport terminals, and refineries. But this approach does not identify the most vital components of any infrastructure which leads to an inadequate strategy and wasted funding. We show that single-point audits lead to the wrong conclusions and do not provide sufficient national security relative to the effort and money being spent. Instead, we propose an approach similar to social network analysis whereby a critical infrastructure is modeled as a network and then analyzed to identify the critical nodes and links. We present models and software to analyze such networks to obtain optimal resource allocation such that network risk is minimized. In the parlance of network science, our approach extends the theory of scale free networks to incorporate damage estimates for nodes and links. By exploiting the structure inherent in a network, we are able to allocate resources in the most optimal manner, which leads to a fundamentally different strategy than currently practiced.

Rudolph Darken is the Director of the Institute for Modeling, and Simulation (MOVES) and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is the Chair of the MOVES Curriculum Committee and is also the Associate Director for Research for the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His personal research has been primarily focused on human factors and training using virtual environments and computer gaming media with emphasis on navigation and wayfinding in large-scale virtual worlds. He is a Senior Editor of PRESENCE Journal, the MIT Press journal of teleoperators and virtual environments. He received his B.S. in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990 and his M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from The George Washington University in 1993 and 1995, respectively.

Ted Lewis is Professor of Computer Science and Academic Associate of the Homeland Security curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School. He served as Sr. Vice President of Eastman Kodak Company, President and CEO of DaimlerChrysler Research, North America, Editor-in-Chief (twice) of IEEE Computer magazine and IEEE Software magazine, and has authored more than 100 papers and 30 books over the past 35 years on subjects ranging from software engineering, parallel processing, to hi-tech business. Currently, he teaches the Critical Infrastructure Protection course at NPS and does research in the application of network science to strategy and policy questions for the US Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Lewis' textbook, "Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security: Defending a Networked Nation" will be published by John Wiley & Sons, in April 2006.