Abstract:
Biorisk management establishes the practices, procedures, system processes, and policies to manage laboratory biorisks, which are vital in the daily operations of research institutions involving biological materials, technologies, and scientific information. Biorisk oversight is the core function within biorisk management that continuously monitors those processes, procedures, system processes and polices to grade whether or not research institutions and laboratories are compliant. Biorisk incidents since the 2001 anthrax letter cases have spawned diverse proposals, suggestions, and recommendations to expand oversight. Policy recommendations to strengthen biorisk oversight requires the scientific and security communities to understand the entity interrelationships associated with biosafety and biosecurity, what data is collected, and the shared oversight responsibilities between federal agencies and research institutions. Unlike past biodefense studies, this dissertation adopts the design science research for information systems (DSR-IS) engineering framework to produce visual artifacts that examine the entity interrelationships explaining the research, security, and oversight resources involved with biorisk oversight.
