It’s important to me that we share with our audience in communities across the country how we are making our nation more secure. That is one of the many reasons I am so pleased to publicly announce the official launch of the S&T Year in Review. To reach you where you are—the web, Twitter or Facebook, we took this opportunity to showcase our many accomplishments in a web-based format, creating a digital experience that could play across multiple platforms, allowing us to tell our story in a more compelling and meaningful way.
2015 was a pivotal year for S&T, and we accomplished a great deal. To achieve these accomplishments we used our five visionary goals as our guide. With a 20-year outlook to reaching these goals, 2015 focused on near-term solutions and on building and growing meaningful partnerships.
As you will see in the review, our near-term solutions meant putting technology in the hands of our operators across the government, in local communities and in the private sector. We helped law enforcement by bringing them cyber forensic solutions that help crack cases and introduced improved protective equipment for firefighters like gloves that prevent puncture and burn when it matters most. We saved lives with technologies like FINDER that found four people under the rubble in the Nepal earthquake, and we built a capability to reconnect families with the Rapid DNA technology that can match DNA between family members in just 90 minutes. We leveraged our technology that we’ve used in airline screening to get fans through lines at the stadium—quickly and safely—with the Fast Access technology.
These are just a few examples of how we are working to make our world more secure. We are also partnering like never before to achieve our goals. In 2015, we used our partnerships in industry, the start-up community, academia, laboratories and countries across the globe to find innovative solutions. We engaged these audiences in new ways—by accelerating research and engaging innovators in Silicon Valley to tap into the next cutting edge technologies.
In this review, we are presenting our accomplishments not just as data, but as a story about meeting our mission to take our knowledge of science and our tools of technology to make our homeland secure. I hope this review brings to life the work of S&T and our dedication to protecting this great nation.
Please take a moment and visit the Year in Review!