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On Point: Q&A With Jamie Wells

Jamie Wells serves as the executive director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate’s laboratories and academic centers, where he oversees the directorate’s research, development, testing and evaluation capabilities, including five laboratories, academic centers of excellence and academic internship programs.

Jamie Wells, executive director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate’s laboratories and academic centers, speaks on homeland security technologies and partnerships. Credit: Photo Agency-stock.adobe.com

How can your team support delivery of technologies for homeland security?
Many of our laboratories conduct testing and evaluation, so the laboratory isn’t necessarily responsible for the transitioning piece, but the testing and evaluation they conduct makes sure ultimately that our operating components are making informed decisions about whether a technology is mature enough to transition into operations, and if so, what the considerations are in terms of employment, maintenance and longer-term sustainment.

A different aspect, though, is the role that our National Urban Security Technology Laboratory plays. They are largely focused on testing and evaluation, and support decisions not only that we are making within DHS, but through the SAVER [System Assessment and Validation for Emergency Responders] program, are helping federal, state and locals make smart decisions about how they’re spending limited dollars in commercially developed first responder technologies.

There are opportunities to conduct research and development. I’ll give you an example within our Chemical Security Analysis Center. They’ve played a role and led R&D programs in the space of toxic industrial chemical detection systems, whether that’s for chlorine or ammonia.

Do you have partnerships with other U.S. agencies and international organizations?
For S&T writ large, yes. We have 14 bilateral science and technology international agreements with individual countries around the world. We have S&T liaisons at our embassies in Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ottawa, and we have relationships outside of explicit bilateral agreements with a wide range of other countries.

In some cases, there is a direct relationship with one or more of our laboratories. The Transportation Security Lab works quite regularly with the United Kingdom and the European Union to set detection technology standards and to compare notes, so that we develop similar screening capabilities and can learn from one another. The chlorine and ammonia detection systems that I mentioned with our Chemical Security Analysis Center are immensely important with our Singaporean partners, given the massive port infrastructure and throughput of shipping of both of those chemicals.

NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] is a really tight partner in that space. Obviously, they’re largely responsible for the standards portion of that. But that relationship has been critical so that as we learn more about those technologies, NIST can make smart decisions about where and what our standards need to be, and how we influence international standards to align with our national priorities.

Are there any threats the public needs to pay more attention to?
I have a smile on my face because that’s not intended to be a loaded question, but there’s a lot behind that.

I grew up in the Department of Defense, both as a dependent, as an active-duty soldier in the Army, and eventually as a Department of the Army and Secretary of Defense civilian during the advent of widespread internet access and mobile devices. [Initially], people were super interested in all the cool stuff they could do on their phone, and there weren’t a whole lot of privacy concerns. But the consumer base has become smarter about their own data, how it’s used, how they can control it.

I think we’re going to end up in a similar space with the increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across all platforms and interfaces, where we as users are really leaning into the cool capabilities that AI and large language models in particular are enabling, and we’re not as focused about the potential pitfalls of relying on large language models and things like Claude and OpenAI, all the models that are available. I don’t necessarily mean just security risks, but the frailty of those systems under certain conditions, and the limitations as to what you can get out of them.

We’re going to get smarter as consumers about where we should and shouldn’t inherently depend upon AI agents and where we need to use that as the starting point for our own thoughts rather than the endpoint for our own thoughts.

This column has been edited for length and clarity.