Reconnect 2025: Port Security
June 23, 2025 – June 26, 2025
Location: Hilton Mystic, 20 Coogan Boulevard, Mystic CT
Click here for map.
Organizer(s):
Margaret (Midge) Cozzens, DIMACS
Contact(s):
Isha Cole-Glaster
CoRE Building
96 Frelinghuysen Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854
E: ishadc@dimacs.rutgers.edu
V: 848-445-4521
Reconnect workshops expose faculty teaching undergraduates to current
applications of mathematical and computational sciences and provide an opportunity for government or industry professionals to learn about recent research in related areas. The topic will be presented over the course of 3 days in a series of lectures and activities. Participants will be involved in activities that they and their students can continue to use and explore after the workshop. They will begin to draft modules that can be used in their classrooms and others around the country.
The featured topic for Reconnect changes each year. This year’s topic is Port Security.
Reconnect in 2025 is sponsored by the SENTRY DHS Center of Excellence led by Northeastern University. Sentry’s mission is to develop ways to protect soft targets and crowded spaces. Ports are certainly soft targets and so are the vessels that arrive and depart, whether passenger or freight. We will explore disruptions to the marine transportation system (MTS), including infrastructure failures like the bridge collapse in Baltimore, wildfires in Los Angeles leading to power outages at ports, potential blockages of key choke points like the Kill van Kull in the Port of New York/New Jersey, cyber-attacks on terminal operating systems, and weather damage. Sometimes the disruptions involve multiple components, like cyberattacks
intending to make it easier to do physical attacks.
We will discuss mathematical models to aid in understanding the impact of different disruptions and how to mitigate them. We will study models for container inspection processes, for port reopening after a disruption, and explore risk assessment for multiple-component disruptions.
The program will include a tour of the Coast Guard Academy on June 23, followed by dinner hosted by the Academy.
Participants should arrive at the hotel before 1:00 PM on June 23.
Confirmed Speakers:
- Jillian McLeod, Professor of Mathematics, U. S. Coast Guard Academy
- George Nacarra, Rear Admiral (retired), U. S. Coast Guard and SENTRY
- Fred Roberts, Director of CCICADA, Emeritus Director of DIMACS, and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, Rutgers University
Speaker Bios:
George Nacarra is a retired Rear Admiral in the U. S. Coast Guard and is the Chair of the SENTRY Practitioner Advisory Board, a role to which he brings significant expertise in safety and security design, testing, and deployment from 54 years of experience in former roles within the U. S. Department of Homeland Security. Prior to his retirement in 2019, he served as the Chief Security Officer for the Massachusetts Port Authority where he sought innovative solutions to various security challenges. Before joining MassPort, Admiral Naccara was one of the first Federal Security Directors in the newly established Transportation Security Administration serving from 2002 to 2014. He launched his career in the U.S. Coast Guard, serving for 37 years before retiring as a Rear Admiral. He is a Harvard University fellow with a master’s in business management from Central Michigan University and a bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
Fred Roberts is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers 
University and Director of the Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA), which was founded as a DHS University Center of Excellence.He is the author of four books, editor of 25, and author of over 220 scientific articles. His recent edited books include the first book on maritime cyber security in 2017and a 2021 book Resilience in the Digital Age. Dr. Roberts has led projects with the Coast Guard on boat and aircraft allocation, fisheries law enforcement, hoax calls, oil spill response in the Arctic, and automated methods for finding errors in key Coast Guard databases. He led the University-Coast Guard pioneering research initiative on maritime cyber security that included the rollout of the Coast Guard’s cyber security strategic plan and led to invited briefings at a NATO cyber security conference. His most recent project has involved complex disruptions to the marine transportation system, which has involved close collaborations with the Coast Guard, including a recent briefing to the Coast Guard Board of Inquiry called to order after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore. He has also led projects with TSA, FEMA, CBP, and others, for example projects that prepared best practices for stadium security that are widely used by the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball and a project that NYC’s world’s busiest bus terminal has used for crowd management and evacuation planning. Dr. Roberts is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His awards and honors include the Commemorative Medal of the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists, the Distinguished Service Award of the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory, the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers Pioneer Award, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris-Dauphine.
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