About
Overview
On June 15, 2022, University of South Florida President Rhea Law announced the formation of the university’s Global and National Security Institute (GNSI), culminating the long-term strategic goal of positioning USF as a leader in developing robust and interdisciplinary analyses of large scale global and national security problems.
Today’s national security environment is increasingly complex and covers whole-of-society problems such as extremism, biothreats, climate change, disinformation, and cybercrime. Advances in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, extended reality, quantum computing, and biometrics will require national security policymakers to understand complexities they’ve never had to consider before.
The University of South Florida recognizes this trend and has identified global and national security as a long-range, strategic area of focus, with GNSI leading the effort. The challenges ahead require a unique, alternative approach that offers practical, actionable solutions to policymakers.
To this end, GNSI will provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national, and global level, focused on the intersection of security policy and technology. It will operate across science and technology, human dynamics and social behavior, and cybersecurity.
GNSI will work closely with leaders and experts from external academia, government and the private sector, in combination with the advanced scholarship and research already available at USF. The final result will feature the best thinking from each of these groups and create interdisciplinary solutions that look at problems from all perspectives.
GNSI is embarking on a journey to become an internationally recognized thought leader across the global and national security environment by 2027.
GNSI will benefit greatly from USF’s status as a premier research university. We will leverage internal academic excellence, and link in external expertise from colleges and institutes with similar interests in the national security policy and technology.
GNSI will synchronize this talent to bring diverse yet focused solutions to broad security policy challenges. This will enable USF to secure additional grant opportunities for advanced research and publication regarding the global security environment.
GNSI will also support the Institute for Applied Engineering in attaining status as a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). Finally, we will establish the right layers of internal and external oversight to provide near-term and longer-term strategic guidance in our organizational build-up and contributions to global and national policymaking.
GNSI will work with academic experts and leaders at USF to identify prospective grants and build proposals to win them. We will leverage our university’s faculty talent to build cross-functional research teams aligned with the grant’s focus area. This activity will provide a cumulative effect and facilitate access to additional resources across USF’s academic landscape.