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Defending Against Biological Terrorism
| Speaker | Dr. C. A. Aguilar |
|---|---|
| Organization | MIT Lincoln Laboratories, MA |
| Location | EBII 1230 |
| Date | November 20, 2009 1:00 PM |
The intentional use of disease as a weapon has been recorded throughout human history. With modern technology, the potential impact of biological attacks is exceeded by only nuclear weapons. The dramatic advances in the biological sciences in the last few decades, and the expertise accumulated in large state-funded offensive biological weapons programs, have made the process simpler for those who are inclined to pursue such weapons.
The United States is in the midst of an aggressive research and development program to prevent, detect, and mitigate the effects of biological attacks. Research thrusts include rapid detection and characterization of biological agents for surveillance, response, or forensic purposes. Strategies for organizing and deploying medical resources following an attack are being developed and tested. Improved medicines are needed for prophylactic and therapeutic purposes. Information fusion and data mining techniques are needed to intelligently process diverse data sets for detection and response to an attack. Modeling and simulation of attacks and remedies are used to develop system requirements and designs and to test defensive implementations. Extensive environmental and clinical measurements are needed to understand the performance of technologies and for proper parameterization of simulations.
This presentation will frame the problem by describing the important characteristics of biological weapons, discussing the technical challenges in defending against these weapons, and providing examples of the technologies and systems being developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to address the problem of biological weapons. The wide breadth of research disciplines in this field will be highlighted.
Speaker’s Bio:
Dr. Carlos A. Aguilar is a member of the technical staff in the Chemical and Biological Defense Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Carlos received the B.S.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2002, an M.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering in 2005 and Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2008 both from the University of Texas at Austin, respectively. Before joining MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Dr. Aguilar was a Visiting Scientist at IBM - T.J. Watson Research Center, where his work involved photoelectron spectroscopy of individual metal-oxide nanowires. He has won several awards including the George H. Mitchell Award for Excellence in Graduate Research from the University of Texas in 2007 and the HENAAC – Graduate Student Leadership Award in 2008. His current work at the laboratory includes research related to biometrics and non-invasive sensing modalities.
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