Bryn Mawr College
A newsletter on research, teaching, management, policy making and leadership in Science and Technology

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. government agencies mobilized to assess the homeland's vulnerability to future terrorist threats. Among other areas, they identified the country's network of ports and borders as focal points for the entry of potentially dangerous materials and persons.

Carol Linden '70

Because government agencies alone cannot effectively develop technologies to monitor every mile of our borders or ports of entry, scientists at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have engaged both industry and the national laboratories to develop detection systems and architectures for interdicting threats such as radiological and nuclear materials. Technologies resulting from these partnerships are being successfully deployed and tested.

"Detection systems have been put in place in the Port of New York and New Jersey, so they are now operating in the real world to see whether they work and how they may be integrated into day-to-day operations," says Carol Linden '70, senior scientist in the Office of Research and Development, which is part of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate.

For Linden , securing our borders and ports is just one among many initiatives to make the homeland safer. Since she joined the DHS in early 2004, Linden has worked to plan science-based countermeasures to terrorist attacks. "There is a huge amount of work going on across the spectrum of all possible threats — chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high explosives. Our work also includes homeland-security issues related to protecting critical national infrastructures. We have our work cut out for us," Linden says.

Linden's career in science management and national security came about almost by accident. After earning a Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1974 and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, she joined a laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She hoped to eventually land a research position in the federal government, perhaps at the National Institutes of Health.

"At the time, to get a civil-service job in science, you had to put yourself on a federal register," Linden explains. "So I filled out the necessary paperwork in the 11th hour of an open-registration period. Out of the clear blue, I received an offer for a position at Fort Detrick in Maryland. It was a government job, but I didn't know what it would be like to work for the military. I accepted the offer from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, not thinking that it was a big commitment or where it might lead me. They were looking for someone with expertise in some of the things that I had worked on at Caltech, and I joined USAMRIID in 1979," Linden recalls. "I found that working for the army was new and very interesting."

For the next six years, Linden ran a lab that investigated receptor-mediated endocytosis to learn how viruses and other proteins enter cells. In 1985, she moved into management at USAMRIID. As a biologist in the contract management office, she oversaw the administration of extramural research contracts. "I managed hundreds of university researchers across the country that were working on USAMRIID-sponsored research projects," Linden says. She rose through the ranks and in 2000 became director of the Department of Defense medical, chemical and biological defense research program with responsibility for planning, managing and prioritizing research on developing countermeasures to biological weapons.

Linden's work took on new meaning in the early 1990s. "Things took a sharp turn with the fall of the Soviet Union and the biological weapons threat posed by Iraq in the first Gulf War. These events reoriented our thinking, energized our programs and brought attention to many of the issues we are dealing with today," she says.

The events of 9/11 and subsequent anthrax letter attacks reinforced the critical importance of protecting the homeland from potential biological warfare threats. In 2003, on detail from the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Linden was named chief scientist for the Chemical and Biological Directorate at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. She coordinated medical and nonmedical research programs aimed at developing defense strategies against chemical and biological threats to the military. This included the development of detection and decontamination systems as well as vaccines, drugs and diagnostics.

As a DHS senior scientist, Linden now oversees research on technological countermeasures to biological, chemical, radiological and other threats. "One of our biggest efforts is to get a grip on three critical elements of risk — threat, vulnerability and consequences — and thus better understand how to prioritize these threats and how best to respond to them," Linden explains. "Our main goal is to develop and deploy countermeasures that reduce our vulnerabilities and increase our security against the full spectrum of threats to homeland security."

Looking back at her time at Bryn Mawr, Linden says, "I was a biology major, but I also loved all of the liberal-arts courses. What I got out of Bryn Mawr that was most critical in my career as a scientist was learning how to write. It's not just being able to do science and math. You have to be able to organize your thoughts and communicate them to people. That has been very important throughout my career." 

Jennifer Fisher Wilson is the science writer for the Annals of Internal Medicine .