December 5, 2005

Dear Colleagues:

I am very pleased to report that the federal government today awarded The Johns Hopkins University $15 million to lead a research consortium dedicated to advancing preparation for and response to national
emergencies.

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, was kind enough to travel to Baltimore today to make the announcement.

The Center for the Study of High Consequence Event Preparedness and Response will be based at Johns Hopkins and involve 21 institutions across the United States.

We all hope and pray there will never be another 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. If there is, however, the knowledge developed by this new center will go a long way toward assuring the best possible preparation
and the most humane, coordinated effort possible to assist victims and speed recovery.

The center will use its three-year Homeland Security Center of Excellence grant to conduct rigorous, scientific investigation of both the theory and practice of emergency preparedness and response. Among the issues to be explored are critical decision-making, integration of regional resources, surge capacity-the ability of medical facilities to respond to a sudden influx of patients-and health systems integration.

Among the center's key goals will be educating the next generation of leaders in science, policy and public service in these and related fields.

Already, Johns Hopkins is among the national leaders in addressing these questions. In fact, I wrote to Tom Ridge, then President Bush's director of homeland security, shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks,
expressing the university's desire to use our resources to assist the nation in preparing for and responding to massive emergencies.

Among our first acts in furtherance of that mission was creation of the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response early in 2002. CEPAR serves as the command center and clearinghouse for Johns
Hopkins-wide planning for and response to emergencies. It will also be the focal point of the new consortium.

Lynn Goldman, professor of environmental health sciences in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Gabor Kelen, chief of emergency medicine in the School of Medicine and director of CEPAR, will be co-principal investigators for the new center.

Besides Medicine and Public Health and the third lead partner, the Applied Physics Laboratory, university divisions involved include the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education and the Whiting School of Engineering.

Gabe Kelen and Lynn Goldman did an incredible job assembling this impressive Johns Hopkins group -- and our many outside partners -- and marshaling their remarkable expertise. The magnitude of their success is
reflected in the fact that our proposal was selected from among 34 received and reviewed by Homeland Security.

I congratulate Gabe, Lynn, everyone in CEPAR, and the representatives from all the Johns Hopkins divisions who did such a magnificent job putting together this consortium and spearheading its comprehensive
proposal.

We are especially pleased that Johns Hopkins' commitment to serving the national interest has been recognized by the Department of Homeland Security-and that this grant will enable us to do much to fulfill our
commitment.

For more details, you can find the department's official announcement of the grant at: www.dhs.gov.

A Johns Hopkins Gazette story will be online shortly at http://www.jhu.edu/gazette/2005/12dec05/12dhsgrant.html.

We look forward to sharing with you information about the center's accomplishments over the years to come.

Sincerely,
William R. Brody
President