Gina Ligon

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NARRATOR: April 19, 1995. Timothy McVeigh destroyed a federal office building in Oklahoma City using a truck filled with explosives.

NARRATOR: At the time, Gina Ligon was a high school student in Oklahoma. She remembers going with her classmates to see the destruction.

LIGON: It completely changed how we perceived our own safety. Realizing what people are willing to do in the name of extremist belief.

NARRATOR: Today, Dr. Ligon is director of a new center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, dedicated to counterterrorism. In this episode of Leading Nebraska, we explore how the center works to keep the country safe. Construction is underway at Mammel Hall, home of the College of Business Administration on the UNO campus. The second floor of the new addition will house NCITE—the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center of Excellence. NCITE is funded by a 10 year, $36 million grant from the U-S Department of Homeland Security. UNO is the coordinating university for NCITE, which features 17 partner institutions across the country and in London. At the helm, is Gina Ligon. Dr. Ligon opens the door to the Koraleski Commerce and Applied Behavior Lab, one of the facilities that will be moved to the new addition when it’s ready.

LIGON: This is where we do a lot of the experimental research with some of the propaganda of these extremist groups. So we have all these instruments that measure things like skin response, pupil dilation, all these indices of arousal so we can get at physiological reactions to malign influence techniques.

NARRATOR: In another room, a large, black box is used for a different project. Researchers are studying whether holograms can be more influential in recruiting terrorists than a human being.

LIGON: We worry so much about the technology that’s available right now, What’s App, telegram, how they can reach into the homes in America so easily. What’s going to happen when they can actually hologram into a kid’s bedroom…and how will that change how influential they are and how much that person feels like they’re really part of a group?

NARRATOR: Computer screens lined up on one side of the room display a web of connections to other locations on campus or across the country…for sharing documents and other collaborative activities.

LIGON: We’re also hooked up to some space in Reston, Virginia and they’re the people who developed the technology. So it’s a government capability and it allows us to be able to have, we call it the high-tech collaboration room and so we can collaborate with anyone across the country with this as long as we send them the link to where the app is, we can take control of their desktop and they can take control of ours.

NARRATOR: Collaboration is key to combating terrorism. That’s why the new center is multi-disciplinary, involving research from business, information and technology, criminal justice, political science, psychology and other academic areas.

LIGON: We have professors at the Med Center who are in charge of how they would train public health officials in relation to an outbreak. We could use some of their method to be able to help with our responses to terrorism. There's also a faculty member who's a cyber criminologist. And so he looks at how terrorists use things like the dark web and other types of infrastructure to communicate and move resources back and forth. And so it's such an enormous problem that you really need to be able to pull from all these different academic disciplines to be able to combat it. If we hadn't built those collaborations and been working together toward these efforts, there's no way this would have happened.

NARRATOR: What DID happen was a highly competitive grant process. UNO rose to the top, building on years of research and collaboration.

LIGON: Every terrorism researcher I know applied across the country to be the lead and they went through this huge process, scientific review. Then they got reviewed by Department of Homeland Security, they selected two schools to be the finalists. And they came and did a site visit where they inspected the University of Nebraska at Omaha to see if we would be a viable partner. And we were selected. So very exciting for us. What it means for our university is that we are sort of the trusted agent or the scientific partner, the academic partner of Department of Homeland Security for all counterterrorism research.

NARRATOR: The center will help identify and coordinate research that fits the needs of Homeland Security. NCITE will provide workforce development and training, preparing students for future employment in related fields. Clara Braun is a graduate student in criminology and criminal justice.

BRAUN: I would love one day to work for Department of Homeland Security as one of their directorates for counterterrorism. They have a number of criminologists who work for them right now who do this same work. So I would want to continue with the research that we do, we apply it to the counterterrorism professional. I want to continue on with that kind of work.

NARRATOR: Clara works with Dr. Ligon on one of her main research projects studying life history information of domestic terrorists in the United States. Studying the profiles of homegrown violent extremists will help shed light on how they got there and how to stop them. Research suggests domestic terrorists fit five different profiles. For example, the younger of two brothers who carried out the Boston marathon bombing in 2013 fits the category of “accomplice kin.”

BRAUN: So there are people who radicalized because of some sort of romantic or familial relationship. We have a lot of husband and wife couples that fall into that categorization. So the husband introduced the wife into the ideology, and she subsequently radicalized.

NARRATOR: Clara says being part of the project and working with Dr. Ligon provides unmatched learning opportunities.

BRAUN: She's so inspiring. She's such a good mentor and I knew that this is what I wanted to do.

NARRATOR: The center provides additional scholarship opportunities for students. For example, a new fellowship program requires graduate students to invent a technological product, process or solution needed by Homeland Security. Building student experience helps strengthen the job pipeline.

LIGON: What this center does is it gives our students here in Nebraska, a chance to get exposed to those missions of the government, to embed in government agencies and then bring that knowledge and talent back to Nebraska to be able to innovate and develop solutions for what their problem sets are. So that's part of the really cool thing about the scholarships is they have these embedding grants where students can go and embed in like a TSA at the airport and learn about how they are screening you know, foreign nationals when they come into the to the US and what concerns they have and they might be able to develop a technical solution or a process solution to be to help that.

NARRATOR: Nebraska also stands to benefit from the new center through economic development.

LIGON: I see a potential is for us to also be able to change the economic ecosystem of Omaha add to that national security business startups, people being able to build organizations here in Omaha to serve this mission. So very excited about all the how we're going to transition this research into businesses here for Nebraska.

NARRATOR: For Dr. Ligon, directing a counterterrorism center seems a long way from her background in industrial and organizational psychology. But it makes sense because terrorist groups are organizations.

LIGON: Most people with my degree learn how to use their degree to make organizations stronger, and I use my degree to help the government break organizations. And so it really works because people with my training, know how to, for example, enhance collaboration. Well, how can the government help deter collaboration or thwart collaboration between members of a terrorist group.

NARRATOR: Her research includes how terrorist leaders pull the levers that trigger young people to join in.

LIGON: I've been really interested in how you can have someone from a totally different country, motivate and recruit someone inside of America to want to do something so devastating. And to me, that's a leadership issue and understanding how they influence and what levers they pull to be able to get these young people to want to sacrifice themselves and other people in the name of that ideology has been really compelling to me.

NARRATOR: Dr. Ligon shares her expertise in the classroom and provides unique opportunities for students. For example, in a class she taught called “Hate and Terrorism,” students studied how terrorist groups use propaganda on the internet. A social media project developed by the students was one of three finalists in a national competition.

LIGON: They got to go present to members of our congressional delegation, Department, Homeland Security, also Facebook and sort of pitched like what they thought we should be doing to fight extremism online. And it was a really motivating experience. There were three students in our group that had never been on a plane before. And so to be able to give them this all-expense paid to Washington, DC and see all of this was really motivating because they got to see how number one DC got to see how great Nebraska students are. And then number two, these students got to really experience something that they didn't think was possible when they were younger.

NARRATOR: Dr. Ligon wants to inspire more students to travel the path toward helping their country the way she was inspired following the Oklahoma bombing and the tragedy of 9/11. Before UNO was chosen for the center, Dr. Ligon hosted officials who toured UNO as part of the grant investigation process.

LIGON: One of the things I said in the site visit is that if they put this here in Nebraska, that you will have people from the middle of the country who are dedicated to stopping the next Tim McVeigh, in whatever way we can. And so I feel very motivated and pulled by that mission and to know that we get to play some part of it here in Omaha is just, I'm incredibly grateful and I will give every ounce of my being to making sure that’s successful and that we help them.

NARRATOR: You’ve been listening to Leading Nebraska. To read the transcript for this podcast – or to find more stories about how the University of Nebraska builds a stronger state – visit Nebraska.edu/nuforne.

NOTE: This podcast is a production of the University of Nebraska. The opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Nebraska.

It was created using excerpts from the actual interview and is representative of the entire conversation. Interviewees are given the transcript prior to airing to ensure technical accuracy. Some edits may reflect grammatical and syntax adjustments for transcription purposes.

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