Jared Cohon

ared Cohon is president of Pennsylvania's Carnegie Mellon University, and he chairs the Academe and Policy Research Senior Advisory Committee within the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council. The committee, formed in December 2003, will provide homeland-security officials with advice and research expertise, Cohon said.

He and his panel will also ensure that the university sector is heard when officials are debating such security measures as additional visa restrictions on foreign students, and restrictions on the easy exchange of information among leading-edge researchers, he said. "One of the roles I play is to try to keep a finger on the pulse of my [university] community, and to convey to the secretary and the leadership of the DHS our concerns," Cohon said.

Carnegie Mellon has 9,500 students, more than 3,900 staff, much government funding, and a great track record in computer-security research. In February 2002, President Bush visited the Biomedical Security Institute, which was created in 2000 to develop and market technology that could detect the first signs of bioterrorism. The institute is a joint enterprise of CMU and the nearby University of Pittsburgh. When he was governor of Pennsylvania, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge worked with Cohon and other university leaders to grow companies and jobs from the universities' research centers.

Cohon, 56, has served as CMU president since 1997. He previously worked for five years as dean of the school of environmental studies at Yale University, and vice-provost for research at Johns Hopkins University, where he helped commercialize some of the university's research.

Cohon has plenty of political and social connections. In 1997, President Clinton appointed him chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and in 1977-78, he served as an energy and environment aide to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and his master's and doctoral degrees in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.