Director Bios

 

1

Brian Michael Jenkins
Director, National Transportation Security Center of Excellence

As a leading authority on terrorism and sophisticated crime, Brian Michael Jenkins works with government agencies, international organizations and multinational corporations. He has directed MTI’s continuing research on protecting surface transportation against terrorist attacks. He is also a senior advisor to the president of RAND. From 1989-1998, Mr. Jenkins was deputy chairman of Kroll Associates, an international investigative and consulting firm. Before that, he was chairman of RAND’s Political Science Department where he also directed RAND’s research on political violence.

Mr. Jenkins has a B.A. in fine arts and a Masters Degree in history, both from UCLA.  He studied at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala where he was a Fulbright Fellow and received a fellowship from the Organization of American States.

Commissioned in the infantry, Mr. Jenkins became a paratrooper and a captain in the Green Berets. He is a decorated combat veteran having served in the Seventh Special Forces Group in the Dominican Republic and with the Fifth Special Forces Group in Vietnam. He returned to Vietnam as a member of the Long Range Planning Task Group, receiving the Department of the Army's highest award for his service.

Since then, he has served on numerous U.S. and international task forces investigating terrorist attacks. In1996, President Clinton appointed Mr. Jenkins to be a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. He served as an advisor to the National Commission on Terrorism and has served on the U.S. Comptroller General's Advisory Board.

Mr. Jenkins is the author of several articles, reports and books, including International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict and Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?.

 

2

Frances Edwards, Ph.D.
Deputy Director, National Transportation Security Center

Dr. Frances L. Edwards is the Deputy Director of MTI’s National Transportation Security Center. She is also an associate professor and director of the Master of Public Administration program at San Jose State University. She is a research associate of the Mineta Transportation Institute, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Public Administration Review (PAR). She is co-author with Friedrich Steinhausler of two books in the NATO Science Series on terrorism threats, and with Brian Jenkins on 9/11, as well as numerous chapters for text and professional books. She has written more than 30 professional journal articles, most recently on Hurricane Katrina for two issues of The Public Manager, and on federal homeland security grants in State and Local Government Review. She is a member of the ASPA Hurricane Katrina Task Force, and has been a member of the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness at Harvard, the Bioterrorism Working Group at Stanford, three NATO expert workshop panels on terrorism, and a commissioner on the California Seismic Safety Commission. For 25 years Dr. Edwards was a practitioner, including 14 years as the Director of Emergency Preparedness for San Jose, California, the nation’s tenth largest city. She has a Ph.D. and M.U.P. from New York University, an MA from Drew University, and a Certificate in Hazardous Materials Management from the University of California, Irvine.

The New York Times, Washington Post and other national media have identified Dr. Edwards as one of the nation’s leading experts on disaster response and recovery planning and training