Kathleen Vogel

Vogel's overall research interests relate to the study of knowledge production on security and intelligence problems.  She has four ongoing projects: 

(1) An assessment of emerging biotechnology threats and ethical concerns.  This project looks at genome editing to assess it's potential for nefarious security applications, as well as the range of ethical concerns that arise with this technology.  This project is funded by the U.S. Air Force and the National Science Foundation, and is in collaboration with Dr. Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley at George Mason University and Dr. Joy Zhang at the University of Kent, UK.  Over the past two decades, Vogel's longstanding research has been to apply social science methodologies and technical approaches to better assess the security concerns from the life sciences.

(2) The use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies by the U.S. intelligence community. This project has involved collaborations with the Alan Turing Institute (London, UK) and the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC), and has involved studying for the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop, implement, and use big data and AI technologies to improve intelligence analysis.  

(3) Understanding patterns and prevalence of human trafficking.  This is a new project that is a large-n investigation of the link between natural disasters and human trafficking. In collaboration with Dr. Catherine Worsnop (University of Maryland), we focus on the potential relationship between natural disasters and a country being a source of human trafficking. We focus on natural disasters as a trafficking push factor—in other words, factors that encourage trafficking from one location to another. We find that natural disasters are positively associated with trafficking,  and we also find that this effect increases when countries have pre-existing socioeconomic and governance-related trafficking risk factors, and when the disaster is more severe in terms of injuries and fatalities. 

(4).The Anthrax Diaries. This project looks at the ethical dilemmas comprising the scientific lives of former U.S. and Soviet bioweapons scientists.  It examines the complex reality of the facts, fictions, logics, and imaginaries of ethical thinking and practices of these scientists in a comparative context involving different scientific and national cultures. This project is in collaboration with Slava Paperno (Cornell University), Slawomir Grunberg (LogTV), and Dr. Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley (George Mason University).  A working website for this project is: http://russian.cornell.edu/bio/cfm/home.cfm?Lang=E&AccessCode=2000300040005000&Bandwidth=large