By Eva Burklund
NCITE Student Communications Assistant
Rik Legault, Ph.D., senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a member of NCITE’s DHS advisory board, recently received the 2023 Meritorious Senior Professional Award for his contributions to the department.
Legault, who holds a doctorate in criminology and criminal justice from the University at Albany, began his career in national security at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) working on a project funded by the National Science Foundation and DHS. He was then recruited by DHS for a position in which he worked with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Protective Service. Later, he began working on counterterrorism research portfolios.
NCITE recently spoke with Legault about his background and his award. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How has your background in academia allowed you to bring a new perspective to the government projects that you work on?
Being able to explain things in a way that makes sense to people that are not involved with social science and demonstrate its value has been really important. You have to meet people wherever they are. I try to maintain this attitude that, if somebody doesn’t understand what I’m saying, regardless of how simply and clearly you think you’ve explained it, it’s up to you to figure out how to explain it to them. It’s not up to them to figure out what you’re saying. And I think insisting on those kinds of ideas and attitudes to help move the work forward has been really helpful.
What do you think the role of social science is going to be in the government moving forward?
Well, government-wide, I’d say it differs depending upon where you go … I think that the future will likely bring bigger social problems that will be driven by new technology that I know a lot of social scientists are already thinking about. For instance, the implementation of – and development of – AI systems. What AI actually can do is unknown … At first blush you might not think that social scientists really need to be involved in that kind of thing. But when it comes to understanding and expressing abstract concepts like equality or justice, or if one wants to think about ethical considerations, these types of things – social scientists do that, and it makes them vital to the development of new AI technology.
I also think that AI may change the way social scientists do research … If AI continues to develop at pace along with leaps forward in computing power, the ability to develop synthetic data that really can, and would, behave like humans and social groups, and being able to measure it and do experimentation in an ethical way could change the field enormously.
Thinking about how things like that may change social institutions is vitally important … Social scientists are the people that are most likely to be able to provide good insight about what those changes will look like, how they’ll affect groups and individuals, and what we might be able to do about it to mitigate the kind of social upheaval that comes from changes of that magnitude.
How do you think the role of social scientists will change specifically in the DHS?
I think that we’ve demonstrated a lot of value to the department as it continues to grow … We’re a domestic agency with domestic considerations, which is very different than a lot of our partner agencies, but we also have a lot to gain by collaborating, cooperating, and working closely with a lot of our international partners. So, thinking about the domestic social implications of what we do and can do for violence prevention, understanding the new communications world we live in and how algorithmically driven information affects people behaviorally – generates a lot of really interesting and open empirical questions. These are not just concerns of the United States, and they’re not just concerns of the Department of Homeland Security.
Could you talk a little bit more about your recent award? What was it like getting it? What were the qualifications?
So, this is a Presidential Rank Award. I was selected for a Meritorious Senior Professional Award. Less than 5% of the executive workforce can be awarded these things, and, ultimately, while you’re nominated by your department, the awardees are selected by the president.
So, I think the combination of the value that social science has been able to provide (DHS) since I sort of took over and began leading that type of work, the fact that we developed the first multinational cooperative research group, and it’s been enormously successful – saving us a lot of time and money and effort and improving our operational relationships through scientific diplomacy – are among the reasons that I was nominated for this award.
I feel like I’m often a person who’s pretty vocal, and sometimes our work consists of providing the results of good science that people don’t want to hear … So, it is difficult work and often difficult to convince people that they want scientific evidence, but I think it’s fundamental to good decision making in the department.
Another reason is the way that the science that I’ve implemented has caused really seismic shifts in the approach of the department. For instance, terrorism prevention is really important. It saves lives. It’s less expensive than trying to build a fortress everywhere in the country, which often just shifts the targets … So, getting the department to look at prevention in that way, to think about it and how we can approach it as a multidisciplinary problem to off-ramp people as opposed to the way we had approached it in the past, which was much more of a security, intelligence, and law enforcement issue, I think has done a lot to improve public trust. But the scientific evidence that we produced provided the support necessary for the department to make that big swing and see our mission space as a prevention activity as opposed to a law enforcement and counterterrorism mission only.
But I’m just one person. And all the people that I work with right now and in the past that make this really good science happen … None of this important work would ever have happened without them. So, it’s really a ton of hard work and a lot of uphill battles and a lot of dedication and a lot of creativity and intelligence that comes from a team effort.
Do you have anything else to add?
I was kind of amazed when I got this award. I feel like I’m often a person who’s pretty vocal and sometimes our work consists of providing the results of good science that people don’t want to hear at the time. So, it is difficult work and often difficult to convince people that they want scientific evidence, but I think it’s fundamental to good decision making in the department. I think the work at places like NCITE providing evidence for people to make good decisions is vital to the department. And I am privileged to be a part of that. It’s very humbling.
