The Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Informatics Research (CBPHIR) was established by the School of Health Information Sciences (SHIS), the Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Preparedness (CBPHP), and the Institute for Biotechnology within the University of Texas Health Science Center - Houston (UTHSC-H). The purpose of the Center is to coordinate the research and development of IT infrastructures and technological platforms for bioterrorism preparedness, emergency response, and situation awareness. The Center promotes collaborative research and technology development activities in the context of:

• Public health situation awareness (bioterrorism preparedness), emergency response management, and command, control, and communication at local and national levels.
• Education, training, and drill excercises for emergency response and mass casualty event preparedness, using state of the art information technologies.
• Community awareness and public preparedness.
• Biomedical, clinical, and public health informatics.

The primary mission of the Center is: "To be the pioneering research entity nationwide, designing and developing the next generation of public health situation awareness infrastructures and bioterrorism response management systems. The Center will promote a multidisciplinary and collaborative environment among academic researchers, private enterprise, and government agencies from the public health, nursing, informatics, and medical domains to provide scientists and the community with state of the art technologies, research and development infrastructures, and training and drill tools for bioterrorism and mass casualty events." This overall mission is supported by three additional goals that differentiate our efforts from other local initiatives:

• To establish a Center of Excellence including scientists, faculty, researchers, and students from different domains:
• To identify needs and develop the rationale to deploy new technologies.
• To provide a continuous source of grant support.
• To collaborate in an inter-disciplinary program to translate and transfer technologies from different domains.
• To identify the potential for integrating intellectual and infrastructural resources with external partners for the purpose of facilitating administrative and executive tasks and to attract funding and investment. These funds will be used to conduct high payoff research and co-development programs which will provide visibility for the Center's projects. The Center is an interface to partners external to UTHSC (e.g. the University of Houston, Rice University, and Baylor College of Medicine), governmental agencies (e.g. NASA, CDC, DoD, and DoHS), and technology providers from the private sector.
• To establish a state-of-the-art training laboratory to simulate, experiment, and explore the public health and environmental information space in a multi-disciplinary environment.