U.S. Army (Ret.)

few days after President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security and installed Tom Ridge at its helm, the Army's chief of staff gave Bruce Lawlor an order: Go help Ridge. Lawlor became Ridge's chief of staff.

In November 2003, Lawlor retired from the Army and left the department. He now serves as a behind-the-scenes adviser and sits on the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

Lawlor began his homeland-security work in 1998 as commanding general of the Defense Department's Joint Task Force for Civil Support. He established military civil-support teams to assist local authorities in the event of a major terror attack on U.S. soil.

At the Office of Homeland Security, Lawlor helped write the plan that became the White House's proposal for a Department of Homeland Security. The department's first day of business was January 24, 2003. A month later, the White House issued the department an order: "Button up" the United States for the war in Iraq. Within 30 days, Lawlor launched Operation Liberty Shield, which beefed up security in vulnerable areas, such as critical infrastructure.

After leaving the department, Lawlor finished the first draft of its strategic plan. "More emphasis needs to be on prevention," he says.

Lawlor, 55, left the department for the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., where he hopes to develop technology that enhances homeland security. He's looking for a way to use a multitude of information sources to verify whether a person is a suspected terrorist-rather than trying to find one "silver-bullet" identifier, such as an iris scan, that is useless without a database of terrorists' iris prints. Lawlor, a native of Bellows Falls, Vt., holds several degrees-bachelor's, law, and a Ph.D. in engineering management-from George Washington University.