Telling Our Impact, Telling Our Story

Guest: Julie Brewer, Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, Science and Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland Security

Host: Brittany Greco, Senior Communications Specialist, Science and Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland Security

[00:00:00] Julie Brewer: We have to really apply science and technology and do the research and development that's necessary for our first responders, our law enforcement entities, our Coast Guard, our Secret Service agents. They need science and technology to take on these challenges. So, it's our responsibility to really take the advancement of science and operationalize that science to support our first responder community, our law enforcement agencies so that they can impact the lives of American citizens.

[00:00:34] Dave: This is Technologically Speaking, the official podcast for the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, or S&T as we call it. Join us as we meet the science and technology experts on the frontlines keeping America safe.

[00:00:47] Brittany: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's episode of Technologically Speaking. I'm one of your hosts, Brittany Greco, and with me today, we are so fortunate to have our Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, Julie Brewer. Julie, thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:59] Julie Brewer: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:00] Brittany: So, I just want to kick things off, just getting to know you a little bit more. Can you tell us about your background before you got to S&T?

[00:01:06] Julie Brewer: Sure. So, my well, first of all, I always like to start out with my family. I've been married to my husband, Nate, for 26 years now, and we have two children, two sons, 18 and 15. My background professionally is my education was in civil engineering, both my undergrad and a master's in systems engineering. And after I graduated from undergrad, I went directly into the military. I was part of an ROTC program at Vanderbilt University. So, as a result of that, went into the Air Force as a civil engineer. Served in the Air Force for about eight years and separated as a captain. And after that, wanted to, explore, and see what was out there and became a consultant for about two years, but then was certainly drawn back into public service, and applied for some civil service positions and was eventually selected to be a program manager in, DHS Science and Technology.

[00:02:07] And since then, I've had various positions in Science and Technology, starting in program management, eventually a branch chief, a division chief, and rose to be a pillar lead. And then finally the Deputy Under Secretary. So, it's been a great 16 years across Science and Technology and, learning everything from construction of laboratory facilities to management of complex laboratories, to program management of technology, serving Components, to learning about innovation and collaboration and all our extramural research to now serving as the, Deputy Under Secretary.

[00:02:46] Brittany: I want to ask a little bit more about your time coming up through the Office of National Labs. Do you have any favorite examples or stories of, you know, projects or programs that you were particularly proud to see during your time?

[00:02:57] Julie Brewer: One of my favorite stories, an interesting one. I came, my very first project within Department of Homeland Security was building the National Bio and Agro Defense facility.

[00:03:10] Brittany: Oh, wow.

[00:03:11] Julie Brewer: And that is a $1.2 billion facility in Manhattan, Kansas. And it is a one-of-a-kind laboratory that has biosafety security level four, which means that we can do research on the highest risk and it's the only laboratory capability in the United States that has that. So, this was a one-of-a-kind laboratory. It'll be the first and the last built in the United States. And I think that's one of my favorite stories because, what we do within the Department of Homeland Security, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in that space is unique. And a lot of American citizens will never know that we did that.

[00:04:01] Brittany: Totally.

[00:04:01] Julie Brewer: But the fact that we are building vaccines and biotherapeutics and characterizing that threat to our agriculture so that the American people can always have confidence in their food supply is critical. And I think I'm just very passionate about that unique capability for DHS to partner with USDA to build.

[00:04:27] Brittany: Yeah, no pressure starting out with here's a billion-dollar laboratory project.

[00:04:31] Julie Brewer: Yeah. No, it was not easy. And we did not get a billion dollars in one year.

[00:04:35] Brittany: Oh, good. Yeah.

[00:04:36] Julie Brewer: So, it was many, it was over many years. That went back to really, advocating why science and technology and laboratory capabilities are so critical, in the United States. And it was just consistently telling that story, and being able to articulate the importance of why the government needs to make investments in this space partnership with industry.

[00:05:03] Brittany: So, when you were coming up through S&T and you had opportunities to go either management track or subject matter expert track, what questions were you asking yourself to help figure out, you know, where you really wanted to go in your career?

[00:05:16] Julie Brewer: Oh, that's a great question. So, early in my career, I both experienced leadership and management and then applying, you know, my expertise in technology and engineering and more solving challenging problems from that perspective. I think about 10 years into my career I looked at what I was passionate about each day coming in and I knew I wanted to, I was passionate about science and technology and engineering and using advancements in that space to really enhance mission. But I really enjoyed more of the management side of leadership and working to advocate and communicate the impacts. So, really at probably about the 10-to-12-year point is when I decided that post program management I wanted to go more into leadership and became a branch chief. And once I became branch chief, you know, the rest is history at that point. Decided to just continue to lead and grow bigger parts of the organization.

[00:06:25] Brittany: What leadership styles resonated the most with you as you were coming up through the military and through S&T?

[00:06:30] Julie Brewer: For me, it's always put people first, you know, every day when you come in what can you do as a leader to more empower and support the people that are doing the mission every day? I think that people first leadership mentality. And the other thing is just give a vision, but then give space to let people design where the art of the possible is. And that's not always easy because there's always about 25 percent of people that will say, tell me exactly what you want and I'll go do it. So, I think sometimes that leadership style can be frustrating to part of the workforces.

[00:07:14] Brittany: Yeah.

[00:07:15] Julie Brewer:You know the other thing I think a lot about in my leadership style is for me in the role that I'm in now, it's partly about the organization and leading the organization and setting a vision, but it's also about really enhancing our broader ecosystem of innovation and partnership across the interagency, across industry, across academia, and really getting the message out for Homeland Security of what we need the broader community thinking about and advocating for others to think about our challenges. So, I think about not just leadership within the organization, but leadership across the whole R&D spectrum of representing the needs of Homeland Security and our challenges. And leading that ecosystem of innovation and science and technology to really take on homeland security challenges and inspiring and then advocating for investment in that space.

[00:08:21] Brittany: That's quite a career. How has your perspective across all of those positions changed over the years? What have you seen, what impacted your thinking about S&T?

[00:08:29] Julie Brewer: Yeah, sometimes it's funny because I like to say to my leadership team, I'm sorry, sometimes I know too much cause I've lived too much in the organization. And I try hard not to be the tactical day to day leader, but more set the strategic vision and let others form the new, actions and executions of that vision. I have learned so much from the challenges and the opportunities that each program manager has to each branch chief, to each division level. The different roles of leadership in this organization are critical. And one thing about S&T, and it's really important in all R&D organizations, research and development organizations, is to really empower at the lowest level you can. Decisions, innovation, where we can find solutions for the first responders, if we are telling our program managers and our scientists what we want, we may not be getting the best solution. So, in my mind, and what I've learned as I've been in many different positions across the organization, is that we really need to empower to allow innovation to happen at all levels.

[00:09:41] Brittany: Sure, because those ideas can come from anywhere. And people hear different things, different conversations.

[00:09:46] Julie Brewer: Absolutely. You know, and I also extrapolate that to our contractor workforce. You know, we have a lot of really great federal employees, but we very much count on a contractor workforce to bring in new ideas, to have been just at Department of Defense or to have been in industry working in Silicon Valley, and then now to come to us. That we need our entire workforce, inclusive of our contractor workforce, to bring those ideas forward and to empower those ideas, and see, and not have a risk, or a fear of failure.

[00:10:20] Brittany: Right.

[00:10:20] Julie Brewer: Failure's okay, and in my mind if we're not failing, we're not pushing the envelope enough.

[00:10:26] Brittany: And I want to pull that thread about failure because this is a federal research and development organization. We have to be good stewards of the, you know, resources that we have. How do you from a leadership perspective consider failure? And how do you talk about failure with, you know, Congress or other interested parties who may need that justification?

[00:10:45] Julie Brewer: I think the two things you have to do when you have failures, first of all, characterize it as learning. It's how you don't sit and say, we failed to do this. No, we learned, what wouldn't work. We pushed the envelope and then we also learned what we need to do with that technology differently next time. So, with failure comes learning and then making sure that we share what we learned in a publication. We as scientists and engineers have a responsibility to not only apply that science and engineering for our Components and our operators and our first responders, but we have the obligation to share that with other scientists and engineers of what we learned and, what we now know won't work.

[00:11:34] Brittany: Right. Because it's not just, you know, we're hoarding information, you know, we only want this to be proprietary, you know, we want to share it because this is going to lead to a development somewhere that would be very helpful for our community. Okay. And I want to pivot a little bit more to talking about S&T specifically. DHS has a very broad mission space. I mean, you know, we think about DHS, and we think about TSA, but it's also the Coast Guard. It's also Secret Service. So how does S&T support those areas? How do we make sure that we're hitting, you know, the right needs at the right time?

[00:12:07] Julie Brewer: Every day, DHS interacts with the lives of millions of Americans. And we take that very seriously. When you think about what the U.S. Coast Guard has to patrol from 95,000 miles of U.S. coast, and as a result of that, the interdictions they have per day, they conduct over 42 search and rescue cases per day. And then you think about TSA and every day just you go to the airport and how much you interact with all our TSA agents, but they screen over 2.4 million passengers per day. And ICE, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations, they initiate more than 40,000 cases per day. And the work that, and that's just three of the agencies in DHS.

[00:12:56] We have to really apply science and technology and do the research and development that's necessary for our first responders, our law enforcement entities, our Coast Guard, our Secret Service agents. They need science and technology to take on these challenges. So, it's our responsibility to really take the advancement of science and operationalize that science to support our first responder community, our law enforcement agencies so that they can impact the lives of American citizens.

[00:13:30] Brittany: And there's that term operationalize, which I think we use here at S&T a lot, and it just, it means just that. Applying it to the real world, making sure it can work in the, you know, mission space, in the field, in the airport, wherever it's needed.

[00:13:43] Julie Brewer: Yes, that's right. A great example of that is the great term and everybody's using today is artificial intelligence. You know, we've been using in, Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology, we've been applying large language models and learning models for years, to our mission space and when we think about AI, we think about, the art of the possible of how we can make our lives better of our law enforcement agents by applying, large language models, artificial intelligence to the work that they're doing every day. So, the amount of data that we have is vast. So, we think a lot about how can we curate that data so that we can then apply advancements in science like AI to help our law enforcement entities really break more cases on a daily basis than they are able to today.

[00:14:36] Brittany: Do you have any examples that we can share about some of the ways that we're applying AI into some of these DHS mission spaces?

[00:14:43] Julie Brewer: Absolutely. We, within ICE, HSI, every day they receive, terabytes of data and what we do is we work with their investigators on the front line to understand how we can use that data and apply, algorithms to that data, so that we can bring forward where we believe we can interdict transnational crime units.

[00:15:11] Brittany: Sure.

[00:15:11] Julie Brewer: So, we have one entity where we used to start four cases per year and now we can do four cases per week because it's not one person looking at all the data and trying to find patterns, but rather it's applying algorithms to that data so that patterns can be brought forward to the investigator and then they can initiate and understand that pattern and interdict where we have fentanyl, where we have child exploitation occurring, where there is transnational crime trying to take advantage of U.S. citizens, we can take that data and really open an investigation.

[00:15:52] Brittany: What are some of those conversations like in terms of figuring out, you know, we're hearing a lot of requests for, you know, this kind of solution, or we hear there's a pain point here. How do those trickle up to, you know, S&T leadership, and then you figure out, oh, these are the projects we're going to pursue?

[00:16:06] Julie Brewer: I, you know, interestingly, it doesn't trickle up to S&T leadership. That's where I'll go back to the beginning of really empowering our scientists and engineers. It's all about relationships. So, for us in the ICE case, it was about our scientists and our laboratorians actually being embedded in building relationships with agents. And then the agent saying, hey, I have this specific case, it would be really interesting if I had the capability to be able to extrapolate the data in this way. And that idea then is then given to, in this case, the computer scientist, the data analytics, the mathematician to then work directly with the agent, come up with what we could do, and then put it into an environment where we can test it. So, it never trickles up to me, and I'm okay with that. You know, that slows us down. That slows down innovation.

[00:17:02] Brittany: So that sounds like it's a nice, relationship opportunity so that someone can say, well, I have this problem and just letting someone go oh, you know.

[00:17:07] Julie Brewer: Exactly. Because you're connected and then you're, you know, going back to the numbers at the beginning. These aren't just numbers. These are, we are actually, you know, our frontline investigators and law enforcement entities are out there helping Americans, you know, and we want to see what their challenges are and then bring a different perspective and a different skill set to help them enhance how they currently do their jobs.

[00:17:35] Brittany: And that's hard to do because so much of what S&T does can be behind the scenes. It's hard to see an algorithm at work, but you look at something like, you know, an airport security line, you might be able to see changes over time. So, how does that, I guess, how do you think about those problems where a lot of the work here at S& T can feel very behind the scenes, can feel invisible at times, um, but we still want to get the word out about, you know, it's having this impact.

[00:18:01] Julie Brewer: What we have to do is we have to demonstrate and articulate more the impact of the science that we've done. I think a lot about, a cloud-based platform that we built for Customs and Border Protection, AMOC, Air Marine Operation Center. They actually had surveillance systems and there were more than, they would just basically have this huge screen of like, this is what's happening on the sea. This is what's happening in the air. This is where unmanned aerial systems are. And our system was able to come in and create a cloud-based platform that allowed Customs and Border Protection to see and trace where the greatest threats were. And as a result of that, we've had more than 35 million in narcotics seized within one year of deployment from that system. And having that capability and deploying that capability for CBP was great for us. Now, old S&T wouldn't articulate that story, wouldn't go and tell that story, but we're more than happy to partner with CBP now and go out and tell that story of what technologies that we've built in partnership with the operators have made a difference.

[00:19:18] Brittany: Yeah. We want to brag a little bit.

[00:19:19]Julie Brewer: Yes, nothing wrong with that. And we have a great story to tell. And we want to tell that story.

[00:19:24] Brittany: Definitely. You mentioned testing a little while ago, and I want to go back to that about, how important testing these technologies is and why that's one of the essential services that S&T provides.

[00:19:36] Julie Brewer: Yes. So, we actually are the test and evaluation agent for the Department of Homeland Security. So, we are responsible for ensuring that before the millions and millions of acquisition dollars that go out from DHS every day, that we're properly testing the technologies and the systems before we go into purchasing them. That doesn't mean we do all the test and evaluation. We establish the policy and review the test and evaluation plans of our Components to make sure that the investments of the American taxpayer’s dollars are going the furthest. And testing is everything from does the technology work? To, when you put it into the operational environment, what are the risks of that? What are your standard operating procedures? Have you built your operations and maintenance plan? All of those, the many facets of test and evaluation are critical. So, we do that for the Department of Homeland Security for billions of dollars of acquisition annually.

[00:20:40] Brittany: And for first responders as well.

[00:20:42] Julie Brewer: Yes, so we actually, an unknown entity that we support, is you think often about all the federal agencies that we support, but we actually represent the first responder community. So, when you think about the first responders, and you think about your police officer and your firefighter and your emergency operations center, a lot of that's all run by the municipalities, by the counties, by the cities. And there is not one entity across the government that was thinking about all that technology that all those entities need. Who can represent the needs of the first responders? So, we think about firefighter gloves, we think about SCBAs, respirators, we think about women in law enforcement and how equipment to protect women needs to be different than equipment to protect men. And we test all those different technologies and equipment. And then we support first responders with data so that when they go out and purchase that equipment, they know that they're purchasing something that's been tested, and they have the results of that. Now we don't go out and support anything in particular. We don't say go out and buy this firefighter glove or go out, but we do the testing. We kind of consider ourselves the consumer reports of first responder technologies for our municipalities, cities, counties, and so forth.

[00:22:09] Brittany: And that's really valuable. That saves them time, and it saves them money. I want to ask a little bit more about S&T in general. Sometimes we hear the remark that, oh, we don't know what S&T does, or we've not heard of you. How would you respond to both of those? Either someone who doesn't know, or maybe someone who discounts what S&T does.

[00:22:28] Julie Brewer: So, you know, I start with how I think about where the world we are in today. And I think about that world and how we're in a time of remarkable change. And there are such significant science and technology advancements that are occurring. And with those advancements comes significant opportunities, but also threats. And the first thing I say is that if we are not investing in research and development and taking advantage of science and technological advancements, then we will be behind. We are mortgaging our future. We cannot surge out of every problem that we have, and particularly within Homeland Security, we need to not only think about how science and technology is necessary to advance our mission, but we need to think about how our adversaries are using that very same science and technology against us. I think a lot about how we deploy technologies every day to the airports, but those technologies can't be stagnant. We always have to understand and characterize how our enemies are thinking about improvised explosive devices, how they're thinking about how they can use that technology against us. So, we need to consistently understand and characterize the threat of improvised explosive devices and then we need to adjust our technologies and the algorithms that are in those technologies so that we are protecting against the latest threats. There's actually a really great story that we have in our mission space, that I actually just returned from Huntsville, Alabama, last week, which, we have a partnership with the FBI, TSA, and science and technology down in Huntsville, Alabama, where we work with our five eye partners.

[00:24:39] Brittany: And what are the five eyes?

[00:24:40] Julie Brewer:The five eyes are the five nations of which we have a significant partnership of the U.K., New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the U.S., and we have a special relationship where we can share intelligence, and in this environment down in Huntsville, Alabama, we are understanding and sharing the latest threats that our adversaries are thinking about and how they're going to use those against us. As a result of that, we can understand and characterize that threat with TSA and the FBI and then we can then basically understand that threat and test our technologies that are currently deployed in the field to understand whether we are able to detect that threat. And if we're not, we can adjust our technologies quickly to be able to do that. So, it is the true connection of intelligence to science and technology and characterization to then deploying to the field. So, it is the FBI, Science and Technology, DHS, TSA operationalizing that information. And that's how every day we're using science and technology to stay ahead of our adversary and protect the American citizens.

[00:26:08] Brittany: Because that's one of the unique perspectives that S&T has to have, is both thinking long-term future, what's going to be changing down the line that we need to be investing in now, but also short-term needs, how do you think about balancing those types of investments, long term versus shorter term?

[00:26:24] Julie Brewer: So, for us, you know, we wish we had a larger budget but frankly we just don't. And in the budget environment that we are in right now, we see our responsibility to do the majority of our investment in this, one to three to five year investment of science and technology to insert it into the field. We certainly think about what's coming down the pike in five to 10 years and do make investments in that space. The majority of where we think about where we need to invest is helping our operators in the next one to three to five years. But I do want to say that, you know, we can't just think about the system that we operate in today. You know, the ports of entry are operating in a system today. When you go through the airport screening, it's in a specific system. When cargo comes into the U.S. into ports, it comes in a certain way. We have to think about the systems into the future for Department of Homeland Security. But we have to do that in partnership with our operators. They're the ones that are living it every day. So, we are standing up, um, what we call our frontier campaigns. And our frontier campaigns are where we are continuing to invest in this one to three year technologies for TSA and CBP and ICE. But we are also thinking about what can we do differently? As the threats are changing, as the systems are changing, how do we need to think about the system differently? Uh, this year, we've stood up three frontier campaigns. The first one was for TSA. And what we are doing is we are thinking about the vision and design of the passenger experience at the airport. And understanding how we can enhance that experience, which includes both speed but also safety and security.

[00:28:27] Brittany: Right

[00:28:28] Julie Brewer: And we've stood up that campaign in partnership with TSA. So how is science and technology changing the future of security and safety and the passenger experience at the airport? And then quickly to follow we're going to stand up a frontier campaign for Customs and Border Protection about the border and the ports of entry. And then after that one with ICE HSI to think about the vast amounts of data we have, how we can curate that data and even more than I've spoken about previously, how we can curate and utilize that data, to enhance our investigations.

[00:29:08] Brittany: Right. Now you mentioned TSA. I don't know if this has changed for you, but ever since I started working at S&T I actually love going to the airport and watching at the airport security checkpoints to the point that I'm sure like some TSA agent is like, ma'am, please, you need to go.

[00:29:21] Julie Brewer: Yeah, keep moving along.

[00:29:23] Brittany: But are you, do you find yourself stopping and thinking about those things differently now that you have, you know, this perspective from S&T as you interact with these systems?

[00:29:31] Julie Brewer: Oh, absolutely. I love going to different airports and seeing the different screening technologies, how they're used. And then I particularly like to listen in to the agents as they talk about the technologies. And I'll always engage in initial conversations, you know, when you walk up with the bin and you put the bin down and you start talking to the agent, they'll always give you interesting insights because they're living it every day. And I've received several, interesting inputs when they don't even know who I am. And I'll look at that technology and think how we were a part of it and their inputs on it.

[00:30:10] Brittany: That's great. And I understand that probably happens with the first responder communities too.

[00:30:14] Julie Brewer: We actually have a laboratory up in New York City, the National Urban Security Technology Laboratory, called NUSTL, and they're phenomenal at what they call operational field assessments. So, they're not just testing, you know, the new glove or the new SCBA or, the new equipment, they're actually working with the first responders, and they'll bring in firefighters from across New York City, and then they'll bring in firefighters from across the U.S., and they'll sit there with 20 to 30 firefighters and actually have them wear the equipment, provide the feedback, fill out surveys, all those things. And then they'll actually give them some of that equipment to then go and use in their force and test it and let us know how it's going. So, no, it's not just about, testing it in a laboratory environment, it's testing it with our operators is critical for us.

[00:31:08] Brittany: So, thinking about the, getting back to the Frontier Campaigns and thinking about budget realities and thinking about budget, you know, fluctuating over the years, how do we prioritize, you know, based on all the needs that we see?

[00:31:20] Julie Brewer:I truly believe everyone we go speak to, from industry, to our laboratories, to our congressmen and our senators, they believe in R&D, and they understand the criticality of it. But it's a challenging budget environment where you just, you have to pay salaries, and you have to pay for systems, and when you get to R&D, it's like, well, let's, that's, that's something we can defer for a year. Well, if you keep deferring it every year, eventually you're just not investing in the R&D that we need to stay ahead of the threat. And that's something that we really, can't do anymore. So, part of what we talk a lot about is going to the Hill and helping educate what we are doing. The impact we’re making. Why what we do every day is critical to the protection of our frontline operators, to enhancing their mission, to arresting more people, to processing more people safely, to, to the speed of commerce.

[00:32:24] Brittany: Yeah.

[00:32:25] Julie Brewer: And we just have to be able to do that. So, it's getting out telling our impact, telling our story, and having more and more people understand that is critical for us.

[00:32:35] Brittany: And as you look into the future, are there any areas that you see there's a lot of opportunity for S&T that you're particularly excited about?

[00:32:42] Julie Brewer:Yeah. I think we have a lot of opportunities to advance how we're thinking about biotechnology, how we're thinking about explosives detection, how we're thinking about data curation and analytics, how we can apply quantum. Quantum computing's coming. The speed with which we'll be able to process data will be more than we've ever seen in the past. Is our data prepared for that? So, I think a lot about the opportunities, but I also think a lot about the threats. The U.S. is known for its innovation. It's known for advancing technology, taking advantage of who's thinking about those challenges in new ways in making sure people are thinking about homeland security and how we can use science to advance our mission. We have Centers of Excellence and having students, whether they be undergrad, masters, or PhD students, thinking about Homeland Security challenges and being able to go out and talk to them about these challenges and having them think about these in new ways is very exciting to me, not only because they're giving us new solutions, but they're also understanding our mission and then hopefully either coming in and serving Homeland Security or when they go out into industry or further their academic careers, they're thinking about our challenges and how they're advancing thinking and helping us.

[00:34:21] Brittany: And I think it's something that folks will take away from listening to this series is that there's so many perspectives, so many backgrounds here at S&T that you know, everyone gets to use their particular enthusiasm or certain subject matter expertise to apply to these problems.

[00:34:37] Julie Brewer: Absolutely. We have, you know, we have such a diverse group of scientists and engineers, but we can't hire all the scientists and engineers that we need in Homeland Security as federal employees, nor do we want to. We really want to take advantage of an ecosystem of engineers and scientists out there in academia, out there in industry, in our federally funded research and development centers in the interagency and we really want to create this ecosystem of scientists and engineers thinking about Homeland Security challenges and bringing that to us so that we can apply that and give that to our frontline operators.

[00:35:16] Brittany: Do you have any advice for folks who want to get into this line of work, whether it's federal R&D or just R&D in general?

[00:35:23] Julie Brewer: You know, my advice to anybody is to really follow your passion and if you follow what you're passionate about, you'll wake up every day and think in new and big ways, to make impact. If you are interested in science and technology, my advice is to always think outside of the box. Don't think about where science and technology is today, but to think about the art of the possible. So many times, we think about existing technologies, how they can be adapted and how they can be applied, which is great. And we should do that, but also spend a percentage of your time just taking a step back and thinking about how we can use science and technology in new and different ways to take on new and different challenges that we face.

[00:36:17] Brittany: That's great. Julie, thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciated this conversation and it's been really wonderful talking to you.

[00:36:23] Julie Brewer: Thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun.

[00:36:25] Dave: Thank you for listening to Technologically Speaking. To learn more about what you've heard in this episode, check out the show notes on our website, and follow us on Apple Podcasts and YouTube, and on social media at DHS SciTech. D H S S C I T E C H. Bye!

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