The NSF SECURE initiative is a comprehensive, $67 million program designed to bolster the security of the United States research ecosystem by addressing international collaboration risks and safeguarding intellectual property. Through a dual-award structure, comprising the SECURE Center and SECURE Analytics, the program aims to serve researchers, research administrators, RSOs, CISOs, funding agency personnel, and a wide array of organizations, including universities, non-profits, and small-to-medium businesses. Guided by federal directives such as NSPM-33 and the CHIPS and Science Act, SECURE emphasizes a community-driven, co-creation approach: stakeholders collectively define problems and design solutions for research security challenges, ensuring relevance and adaptability across diverse institutions and types of research activities.
The SECURE Center focuses on community engagement, providing actionable tools, frameworks, best practices, and training resources tailored to evolving security threats. It operates through five regional co-creation hubs and synthesizes expertise from administrators, scholars, and federal agencies. Parallelly, SECURE Analytics functions as a data-driven platform collecting and analyzing global data sets to identify foreign threats, develop risk models, and deliver timely risk reports and training. It offers tools for at-scale analysis of international collaborations and policy environments, supporting proactive risk assessment and mitigation. The structure of both awards is intentionally collaborative, with strong interconnections and governance that includes advisory boards comprising academia, industry, and national security leaders. The program prioritizes equitable access, burden reduction, and balancing the imperatives of research protection and international collaboration, ultimately empowering the broader U.S. research community to build, implement, and maintain robust research security practices.
