ID Intel

BIOMETRICS

CYBERSECURITY

FORENSICS

LIFESTYLE

20 years of identification expertise

Tracking Internet crime, securing information

Science that figures out what happened

Easy commutes, open spaces, urban pleasures

INNOVATION AND INVESTIGATION IN WEST VIRGINIA’S TECHNOLOGY CORRIDOR | FALL 2014

WVU TECH

infinite POSSIBILITIES

1

#

return on investment among WV colleges*

*Payscale

2014 ROI Report

30

ACADEMIC PROGRAMS

including forensics, nursing, criminal justice & psychology

8

ABET-ACCREDITED

engineering programs

Montgomery, WV | 1.888.554.8324 wvutech.edu

innovative initiatives

TM

The i-79 Development Council promotes economic diversity and business growth, and facilitates collaboration between all sectors to market capabilities and connect to opportunities.

Unique and diverse regional assets enable collaboration in: • integrated aerospace • independent energy

Initiatives:

• identification intelligence • information technologies

DyNet - Dynamic Networking for Small Business

DyNet is a one day event that facilitates agency and prime and subcontractor introductions, capabilities awareness and contract opportunities. High-value workshops are offered throughout the day on topics that are must-know for small businesses in the federal contracting world. This multi-state event is held in two locations annually: DyNet-Fairmont, WV and DyNet-Erie, PA. DyNet-Fairmont held its fifth annual workshop this April and DyNet-Erie completed its third annual event in June. For participating Morgantown partners and additional information, please go to www.dynetworking.com.

Fairmont

Clarksburg Identification Intelligence Ridge

Identification Intelligence Ridge brings together agencies, industry leaders, educational Weston partners and small businesses for meetings of interest and completion of goals which include: Simulated Workplaces in unison with the West Virginia Department of Education, career capture, and career ladders. Identification intelligence is one of the most rapidly evolving sciences in the world and Identification Intelligence Ridge works to connect those industries that identify. For more information, contact the i-79 Development Council at i79dc.org@gmail.com or 304-680-7932.

Charleston

TM

regional innovation reaching global markets

304.680.7932 www.i79dc.org

FROM THE WV DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

Why West Virginia?

WRITTEN BY KEITH BURDETTE, WV Secretary of Commerce & Executive Director of WV Development Office

I

just might be the luckiest guy in West Virginia. For the past three years, I’ve had the honor of working side by side with Governor Earl Ray Tomblin to bring new jobs and investments to the Mountain State. I get to spend my time helping businesses from across the country and around the globe discover what those of us who live here already know: There’s simply no place better than West Virginia to live, work, and do business. I can’t think of a better job than telling the world what makes West Virginia great.

Thanks to the hard work and foresight of our state’s policymakers, businesses large and small are flocking to West Virginia. In the last decade, the state has gained more than $22 billion in new business investments.

Today the state hosts operations of Amazon.com, Allevard Sogefi, Bayer, DuPont, Toyota, Hino, Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney, Macy’s, Gestamp, and other global business leaders. And with the boom in the Marcellus and Utica shales comes even more opportunities to see the state’s economy grow.

Last November the Odebrecht Organization, a Brazilian conglomerate whose businesses range from construction to defense to petrochemicals, announced a Parkersburg location as its site of choice for an enormous new ethane

2

cracker plant. The proposed cracker will establish West Virginia as a hub not just for natural gas production but also the more sophisticated business of transforming natural gas into consumer and industrial goods.

The future is bright. We’re perfectly positioned for even more growth. In recent years, our state’s business climate has been transformed to a degree that is nothing short of revolutionary. We’ve slashed the business taxes that once put us at a disadvantage to neighboring states. Since we privatized our workers’ compensation system, premiums have plummeted, allowing businesses to free up cash for higher wages and new investments in their operations.

Thanks to those and other pro-growth policies, West Virginia now stands out as a leading place to locate new business operations.

Other advantages abound. Businesses that choose West Virginia report that our workforce is our secret weapon. To put it simply, West Virginians know how to work. We are renowned, and justly so, for our work ethic.

We show up for work every single day. We’re loyal, we’re flexible, we bring well honed skills to our jobs, and we never stop learning. And we do whatever it takes to get the job done. To most West Virginians, those values are so deeply ingrained that we never think twice about them—but to employers, they add up to a workforce that can compete with any in the world.

Thanks to our abundance of natural resources, our energy costs are among the lowest in the country—and they’re likely to stay that way for years to come. Our low cost of living, low crime rate, and friendly people make West Virginia a wonderful place to relocate and to raise a family.

And our millions of acres of unspoiled wilderness provide recreational opportunities that are unparalleled in the eastern United States.

To businesses thinking of locating here, we offer a level of service that is difficult to match. Part of that stems from our state’s deep-rooted tradition of hospitality. Part of it comes from our passionate commitment to bringing new jobs to West Virginia.

Whatever the reason, one employer after another has been overwhelmed by our willingness to go the extra mile to bring them to the Mountain State. We help with everything from site selection to financing to the complicated logistics of getting a new operation off the ground. When executives move here to run their companies’ new West Virginia operations, we help them get settled in their new communities, introducing them to local schools, restaurants, and entertainment. In a pinch, we’ve even been known to handle babysitting— whatever it takes to make West Virginia feel like home for those who choose to do business here.

It’s selling points like these that make my job such a pleasure. More importantly this convergence of strengths is moving our state into the big leagues when it comes to business recruitment. The more the world learns about the West Virginia advantage, the closer we get to our ultimate goal: good-paying stable jobs for all West Virginians, for decades to come.

FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE I-79 DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL

i W

elcome to the first publication of IDIntel!

Our partners at New South Media, Inc., have captured the true essence of our I-79 Technology Corridor. This commercial region in North Central West Virginia has retained its traditional business base while successfully diversifying into dynamic new sectors such as biotechnology, forensic science, biometrics, cybersecurity, and energy harvesting and processing, as well as aerospace manufacturing.

The I-79 Corridor features significant federal installations, high-quality health care, affordable energy, and a workforce renowned for its commitment to excellence. Businesses enjoy first-class technology and business parks and a worldclass fiber optic system. Our educational institutions are leaders in their fields and conduct some of the most forwardthinking research in the world.

The innovative crossroads that connect in North Central West Virginia facilitate collaboration to invigorate minds and initiate outcomes. Many of the iconic industries that previously defined the region remain and are woven together through research and development in new, more collaborative ways. The results are leading the world in disruptive new sciences, technologies, and processes.

4

IDENTIFICATION INTELLIGENCE RIDGE

connecting industries that identify

The I-79 Corridor has a high percentage of those with graduate or professional degrees: 8.3 percent, compared with 5.3 percent in the state and 7.8 percent in the nation.

Recent reports find 11,900 highly paid technical jobs in North Central West Virginia’s technology industry, with an impact on the state’s economy of $1.7 billion of output and $975 million of value added. The sector represents 13 percent of total wages in the state.

With many large organizations and companies taking advantage of the region’s lower infrastructure costs and strategic location, a recent economic study found that high-tech industries in northern West Virginia contribute $5.2 billion to the state’s economy each year.

We are within one day’s drive of 60 percent of the U.S. population and centrally located on the East Coast.

We are 225 miles west of Washington, D.C., making us a prime location for decentralization.

A loyal and highly educated business base, low crime rates, short commutes, and a natural lifestyle that includes the beauty of mountains, rivers, and wildlife make the Corridor a favorite destination of many of today’s talented technology professionals.

The I-79 Development Council is proud to showcase Identification Intelligence Ridge with this publication. We encourage you to visit and be amazed. Innovation lives here!

Sincerely,

Deana Dean President, 1-79 Development Council 304.680.7932, i79dc.org, idintelridge.org

TABLE OF CONTENTS

22 BIOMETRICS

Identification Central The world’s largest fingerprint repository continues to grow in Clarksburg.

Solving Digital Crimes, One Course at a Time The next wave of digital crime solvers boost their knowledge.

Biometrics in Support of the Warfighter Powerful biometric databases protect Americans at home and abroad.

Unveiling Crime Steganography researchers decipher the invisible ink of the digital world.

Making the Future Safer Today’s leading biometrics researchers collaborate at the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research.

Training a Generation of Digital Experts West Virginia University trains the next cybersecurity frontline.

Business Spotlights Lakota Software Solutions, Lockheed Martin, CrossResolve, SecurLinx Integration Software, Northrop Grumman, Tygart Technology

A Full Perspective From Morgantown, KeyLogic provides full system assurance to federal agencies.

COURTESY OF THE WVHTC FOUNDATION

48 CYBERSECURITY

58 FORENSICS

Forensics in Service to the State The Marshall University Forensic Science Center improves forensic practice nationwide.

Where Crime Scene Investigators are Made West Virginia University faculty are advancing forensic science and training future experts.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cutting Edge Energy Research Morgantown’s NETL advances the 20

country’s energy independence.

20 Climate Study Fairmont is the site of a NOAA supercomputer.

21 Catalyzing Innovation

Find the funds to spark your research.

2 Why West Virginia?

Keith Burdette, secretary of commerce and executive director of the West Virginia Development Office, explains the benefits of working in West Virginia.

4 President’s Letter

President of the I-79 Development Council Deana Dean introduces the IDIntel publication.

10 The Making of Identification Intelligence Ridge

Read up on the history of the tech industry in West Virginia.

6

13 Getting Here

Plan your trip to North Central West Virginia.

74 Creative Learning

Playful education opportunities abound across the state.

14 Mountain State Musts 79 Bright Business

Where and why to start your visit.

Landscape

Heading Up Health Research NIOSH in Morgantown is a leader

16

in workplace safety research.

Mission Critical Problem Solvers NASA IV&V in Fairmont stops

19

mission critical failures before they happen.

Retreat to West Virginia to break into business.

83 A Playground of Adventure, History, and Culture

North Central West Virginia has the lifestyle you crave.

Fairmont 304-363-8467 | Bridgeport 304-808-6201 | Morgantown 304-296-3721

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BIOMETRICS AND FORENSICS Experts in biometrics, forensics, and identity intelligence applications.

NATIONAL SECURITY, INTELLIGENCE, DEFENSE Experience with both government and private sector clients. We employ the industry’s top scientists, engineers, integration specialists, biometric experts, and government advisors across the US. REPUTATION FOR EXCELLENCE 100% of our current clients have come to us through referral by other satisfied customers.

Woman Owned Small Business (WOSB) Economically Disadvantaged Woman Owned Small Business (EDWOSB)

200 Hart Field Rd., Suite 200 | Morgantown WV, 26505 P: 304.933.9655 | info@crossresolve.com

crossresolve.com

Are you well CONNECTED? Connections matter, and Frontier has connections.

Frontier Business Edge provides businesses and institutions the technology they need to stay connected to their customers and clients and maximize their performance and efficiencies.

Our fiber-optic network and Ethernet platform provide commercial customers the bandwidth and security they need.

PUBLISHED BY

New South Media, Inc. 709 Beechurst Avenue, Suite 14A Morgantown, WV 26505 1116 Smith Street, Suite 211 Charleston, WV 25301

304.413.0104 | newsouthmediainc.com PUBLISHER & EDITOR

Nikki Bowman nikki@newsouthmediainc.com DESIGNER

Jessica May CREATIVE CONSULTANT

Carla Witt Ford carla@newsouthmediainc.com MANAGING EDITOR

Pam Kasey pam@newsouthmediainc.com ASSISTANT EDITORS

Laura Wilcox Rote laura@newsouthmediainc.com Katie Griffith katie@newsouthmediainc.com WEB MANAGER

Each business and institution has unique needs, and Frontier Business Edge’s locally based sales consultants, engineers, and technicians provide the right solutions and best values in the market.

Elizabeth Roth liz@newsouthmediainc.com OFFICE & CIRCULATION MANAGER

Sarah Shaffer sarah@newsouthmediainc.com ADVERTISING

Christa Hamra christa@newsouthmediainc.com Bekah Call bekah@newsouthmediainc.com CONTRIBUTORS

Nikki Bowman, Carla Witt Ford, Katie Griffith, Katie Hanlon, Rick Lee, Laura Wilcox Rote, Elizabeth Roth, Steve Shaluta, Alex Wilson I-79 DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL

Deana Dean, President i79dc.org, idintelridge.org EDITORIAL INQUIRIES

Email info@newsouthmediainc.com.

Call 1.866.408.4422 or visit frontier.com/edge

WEsT VirgiNiA: We’re Wild, Wonderful, and Wired for success!

8

is published by New South Media, Inc. Copyright: New South Media, Inc. Reproduction in part or whole is strictly prohibited without the express written permission of the publisher. © NEW SOUTH MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

A Closer Look ››

Hundreds of businesses in North Central West Virginia engage in today’s innovation economy. In the I-79 Technology Corridor—from Morgantown to Clarksburg—work takes place in bioscience, IT, aerospace, energy, and other sectors. Academic and professional connections tie the corridor to the capital at Charleston, to Marshall University and Huntington businesses, and beyond. Proximity to Washington, D.C., enables the corridor to lead in identification technologies that often originate in homeland security and law enforcement initiatives and later transition to commercial use. In IDIntel you’ll read about the research and entrepreneurship that make this region the Identification Intelligence Ridge.

WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY The state’s flagship institution of higher education, home of the Mountaineers.

Coopers Rock State Forest

Fairmont

Fairmont State University

MARSHALL UNIVERSITY

VALLEY FALLS STATE PARK

Picturesque campus on the Ohio River, home of the Thundering Herd.

Morgantown 33

An idyllic retreat just outside Fairmont.

Clarksburg

Bridgeport

STONEWALL RESORT

World-class lodging, dining, and golf on a serene mid-state lake.

77

79

I-79 TECHNOLOGY PARK

I-79 Technology Park’s 750,000 square feet of world-class office and data center space serve as home to more than 30 businesses and several federal programs. The park lies within one day’s drive of 60 percent of the U.S. population.

64

Huntington

Charleston

STATE CAPITOL

Located in Charleston, the state capitol dome is covered in 23½ karat gold leaf.

NEW RIVER GORGE NATIONAL RIVER

Renowned white water rafting and the iconic bridge.

64

The Making of Identification Intelligence Ridge Savvy political representation and nimble academic and tech communities have made North Central West Virginia a hub for identification technology.

A

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

TIMELINE

nonymity has always been too easy for outlaws—while proving identity has been too hard for the rest of us. But today, thanks to Identification Intelligence—the art and technology that match up individuals, identities, and events—all of that is much less true than ever. North Central West Virginia has long been at the front of that evolution.

Ask anyone in West Virginia’s I-79 Technology Corridor how Identification Intelligence expertise came to be concentrated here, and you’ll hear Senator Robert C. Byrd’s name again and again. The longest-serving senator in U.S. history—more than half a century when he passed away in 2010—Byrd brought dozens of unique and critical facilities to his state, including the National Technology

10

1990 WV High Technology Consortium established.

1991 FBI buys property in Clarksburg to house fingerprint repository.

Transfer Center in the Northern Panhandle, a metals fabrication center near Keyser, and the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, in Green Bank. But Byrd’s inspiration in the 1990s to relocate the FBI’s fingerprint repository to Clarksburg has been perhaps the most transformative for the state’s—ahem—identity.

“The fingerprints used to be on paper cards, millions of them, stored in filing cabinets in our headquarters in Washington, D.C.,” recounts FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Assistant Director Stephen Morris. “Senator Byrd came in and said, ‘We can do it cheaper, we can do it better, and we have the workforce.’ He saw that it made sense for the bureau to relocate, and he saw an opportunity to produce jobs and give work to his state.” The FBI bought 1,000 acres in Clarksburg in 1991 and began constructing a facility for its identification services.

The area’s tech economy was coming up in other ways, too. The West Virginia High Technology Consortium (WVHTC) Foundation, NASA’s Independent Verification & Validation facility, and the National White Collar Crime Center all got their starts in Fairmont in the early and mid-1990s. Longtime Democratic Congressman Alan Mollohan had a big hand in much of that.

But the time was especially right in the mid-1990s for identification technology to explode. Taking smart advantage of opportunities at the state level, Marshall University took early leadership in both police and academic forensics in 1995. Events drew West Virginia University into the field as well. “Following the (1995) O.J. Simpson trial, the FBI came to WVU and said, ‘We really lost that case because we didn’t have the right people to testify—the people who can explain to jurors that the science of biometrics and forensics is valid,’” recounts past WVU biometrics leader Bojan Cukic. The university established an undergraduate program in forensics in 1999, recalls Gerald Lang, WVU

1993 NASA IV&V opens in Fairmont.

1995 Marshall University establishes forensics graduate program and DNA lab. NW3C opens in Fairmont.

FBI moves into Clarksburg facility.

1999 FBI’s first fully automated fingerprint repository goes live in Clarksburg.

2001 Department of Defense opens Biometrics Fusion Center in Bridgeport. CITeR biometric research center founded.

September 11 terrorist attacks.

provost at the time, and that eventually split in two. One part became the Department of Forensic and Investigative Science, now headed up

by Lang. Marshall University Forensic Science Center Director Terry Fenger attributes the early success of both his and WVU’s forensics programs in part to Byrd. “He understood the need for developing forensic science at a national level, and he directed Congressional funding so WVU and Marshall could both bring up our expertise.”

That gave the state solid grounding in forensics. The other part of WVU’s early degree program became an undergraduate degree in biometric systems. It assumed quick prominence with the university’s creation in 2001 of the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), now a four-university National Science Foundation research collaborative. Also in 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense opened its Biometrics Fusion Center in Bridgeport to test devices.

So on September 12, 2001, when everyone was saying, “We need the technology to stop terrorists before they board planes,” North Central West Virginia was well positioned to respond to the need.

Major national prime contractors had already been establishing presences in the corridor to provide the federal anchors IT and other services. As the FBI, DOD, and other government agencies ramped up their biometrics activities in the name of homeland security, contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman staffed up here to do the work—and a roster of indigenous subcontractors sprouted up around them, some of which have risen to prime contracting in their own rights. “It became a nice clustering node around the federal anchors,” says Jim Estep, president and CEO of the WVHTC Foundation. The work only grows as the FBI and DOD continually upgrade their biometric capabilities—and especially as commercial markets begin to embrace the security and convenience advantages of biometric identification.

2004 First use of Department of Defense’s tenprint repository, in Clarksburg.

2006 West Virginia Biometrics Initiative (WVBI) formed as an initiative of the I-79 Development Council.

2007 FBI creates Biometrics Center of Excellence.

The Identification Intelligence disciplines in the I-79 Corridor have come to flow into each other and into the work of the larger IT community. At their overlap, biometrics and forensics generate a powerful crime-solving synergy: The fingerprint a forensic examiner lifts at a crime scene, or the face a surveillance camera captures, only leads to an identification if it matches a record in an existing biometric repository. Forensics has come to include digital forensics, which is directly informed by cybersecurity—a component of most IT companies’ work. And the active technology trade organizations in the corridor—Estep’s WVHTC Foundation and later organizations like the I-79 Development Council and TechConnect West Virginia—help keep the professional connections fluid by providing networking, educational events, and other cross-industry opportunities.

Battelle Technology Partnership Practice found in 2009 that West Virginia is better positioned than any other state to capitalize on the growing demand for advanced security technologies. Two decades after the FBI made a home in West Virginia, the state’s work in Identification Intelligence protects warfighters and police officers, advances crime solving techniques, and improves personal security and convenience. “You are in the center of mass of evolutionary biometric technology being developed—right here,” says the WVHTC Foundation’s Estep. Fenger, at Marshall, sees a bright future. “West Virginia is in my mind in a key position in both forensic science and biometrics,” he says. “We have the infrastructure in place—further economic development should result.”

Byrd’s effort with the FBI has proven to be the epitome of success, says the agency’s Morris. “Talk about reaping the benefits of the seeds he sowed back then. And I think we’re just starting to see some of the payoffs of his work. We’re just at the beginning.”

2009 DOD ABIS multimodal biometric repository goes live in Clarksburg.

2013 WVBI reorganized as Identification Intelligence Ridge.

2014 FBI’s multimodal Next Generation Information system fully replaces IAFIS.

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MorphoTrust USA Leading the Industry, Again MorphoTrust USA, the leader in biometric and identity technology, is pushing the limits of identity operations and identity intelligence with our new cloud capability. Whether your agency collects and processes faces, fingerprints, palm prints, irises, or fuses them for better matches, we are the provider of choice. Contact us at info@morphotrust.com.

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Getting Here

You can easily access every corner of West Virginia by interstate, air, or rail.

Interstates

West Virginia is easily accessible by six major interstates: I-64, I-79, I-77, I-70, I-68, and I-81. The state’s only toll road is a southern portion of I-77.

Welcome Centers are located along these points of entries.

Wheeling Washington, PA

70

Cambridge, OH

PA

250

68

Morgantown

Parkersburg

OH

50 77

79

33

2 Huntington

Clarksburg

Charleston

Rail Service

33

VA 64

Wh te Sulphur Springs

Lewisburg

77

Lexington, VA

Harpers Ferry

Staffed Welcome Center

Rest Stop Area

Airports

Of the state’s 35 public airports, the following eight offer commercial airline service. »»Yeager Airport Charleston

460 Bluefield

81 340

Turnpike Service Plaza

60

Williamson

52

220

33

19

Beckley

Martinsburg

50

219

119

KY

MD

Bridgeport

79 64

9

28

81

Prefer traveling by train? Amtrak’s MARC Rail commuter system runs from Washington, D.C., to Harpers Ferry and Martinsburg. Three days a week, the Amtrak Cardinal, which runs from Chicago to Washington, D.C., stops in Huntington, Charleston, Montgomery, Thurmond, Prince, Hinton, and White Sulphur Springs. For more information, visit amtrak.com.

»»North Central West Virginia Airport Clarksburg »»Tri-State Airport Huntington »»Mercer County Airport, Bluefield »»Morgantown Municipal Airport Morgantown »»Raleigh County Memorial Airport Beckley »»Greenbrier Valley Airport Lewisburg »»Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Airport Parkersburg 13

Mountain State Musts

Harpers Ferry National Historic Park is one of the most visited tourism destinations in West Virginia.

Enjoy a sunset at

Snowshoe Mountain Ski Resort.

Not sure where to start?

We suggest your visit include these West Virginia favorites.

Ride the train . . .

or trains. Take a trip to Bald Knob aboard the Cass Scenic Railroad, let the Durbin & Greenbrier Railroad transport you to some of the most scenic spots in Appalachia, or look for bald eagles from the Potomac Eagle Scenic Railroad.

Eat a pepperoni roll, the iconic state

food. Originating in North Central West Virginia as a favorite of coal miners, you can find them at gas stations, grocery stores, and restaurants.

View the New River Gorge

The Greenbrier

is called “America’s Resort” for good reason.

from underneath the towering New River Gorge Bridge. At 876 feet above the canyon, Bridge Walk will be something you talk about for years.

Spend time in at least one of West Virginia’s

49 state parks, forests, and wildlife management areas.

Blackwater Falls State Park The falls at this scenic state park are one of the most photographed sites in West Virginia.

14

Charleston

No trip to West Virginia is complete without touring the state capital. The dome is gilded in 23½-karat gold leaf.

Shop at Tamarack

Bring West Virginia heritage to your home with the state’s largest collection of artisan-made products.

West Virginia State Parks at a Glance

We’re Closer Than You Think

Five major U.S. cities are within 500 miles of popular West Virginia destinations.

Charlotte, NC Bridgeport, 343 miles Charleston, 264 miles Martinsburg, 386 miles Morgantown, 376 miles Columbus, OH Bridgeport, 188 miles Charleston, 162 miles Martinsburg, 345 miles Morgantown, 205 miles New York, NY Bridgeport, 410 miles Charleston, 532 miles Martinsburg, 262 miles Morgantown, 384 miles Pittsburgh, PA Bridgeport, 105 miles Charleston, 228 miles Martinsburg, 189 miles Morgantown, 75 miles Washington, D.C. Bridgeport, 237 miles Charleston, 362 miles Martinsburg, 77 miles Morgantown, 210 miles

For More Information »» West Virginia Department of Commerce 800.982.3386 wvcommerce.org »» West Virginia Division of Tourism 800.CALL.WVA wvtourism.com »» West Virginia State Parks wvstateparks.com »» National Park Service nps.gov/state/wv

Road Rules

»» Recreation.gov 877.444.6777

Buckle up!

It’s a state law.

Children up to age 3 must be in an approved child safety seat.

No text messaging while driving!

The speed limits are 70 mph

on most interstate highways, 25 mph in most business or residential areas, and 15 mph in most school zones.

15

Morgantown’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is a leader in national workplace health research.

A

WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

virtual reality lab, an anthropometry lab, a driving simulator, and a simulated medical exam room sit at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Morgantown ready to assist researchers in the study of worksite hazards. The institute was born in 1970 out of a nationwide fervor to improve working standards. One of the first NIOSH offices opened in Morgantown to study job safety in coal mining, but the organization has evolved into a much larger operation.

With more than 600 employees, the Morgantown center is one of the largest NIOSH locations in the country with research activity spanning three divisions, each conducting frontline studies with laboratories any scientist would dream of.

“We have a world-class facility for doing inhalation exposures,” says Don Beezhold, director of the Health Effects Laboratory Division within NIOSH. The division studies the impact of various stressors, chemicals, and materials on human health. Research is primarily in the nano-tech area testing the effects of inhaling particles such as multiwall carbon nanotubes on exposed workers. “Carbon, under certain conditions, can form tubes, and tubes inside of tubes, and

16

it’s being used in equipment in a number of different areas. We have designed a computer-controlled apparatus that can instill the nanotubes into an area and are breathed by animals. We can then study those health effects,” Beezhold says. Researchers have found that exposure to these particles can increase the chance of getting lung cancer.

Down the hall, researchers within the Division of Respiratory Disease Studies (DRDS) just expanded their national surveillance of coal miner health. “The purpose is to detect early if a miner is getting lung disease so we can take steps for secondary prevention,” says DRDS Director David Weissman. The division is also looking for disease patterns throughout the country using technology developed in-house.

Meanwhile, the Division of Safety Research is looking at traumatic injury prevention with its virtual reality lab and driving simulators.

A year ago the division released a smartphone app to help workers judge ladder safety by using sounds and signals to warn against any placement issues. “We have more than 24,000 users. It’s being used for worker training and with homeowners,” says Dawn Castillo, division director. The app, she says, received honorable mention in a health and human services innovation competition.

save the date Connect:ID

An Exploration of Physical & Digital Identity in the 21st Century MARCH 23-25, 2015 Walter E. Washington Convention Center Washington, D.C. CONNECTIDEXPO.COM

COURTESY OF NIOSH

Heading Up Health Research

Researchers at NIOSH have developed a smartphone ladder safety app that warns workers of improper ladder placement.

HOW TO BREAK IN TO

IDENTIFICATION INTELLIGENCE RIDGE I-79 DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL 304.680.7932 • i79dc.org LINKING INNOVATION, INDUSTRY, AND COMMERCIALIZATION (LIINC) 304.293.0391 innovation.research.wvu.edu TECHCONNECT WEST VIRGINIA 304.444.2918 techconnectwv.org WEST VIRGINIA HIGH TECHNOLOGY CONSORTIUM FOUNDATION 877.363.5482 • wvhtf.org CVBS Greater Morgantown Convention and Visitors Bureau 800.458.7373 • 304.292.5081 tourmorgantown.com Marion County Convention and Visitors Bureau 800.834.7365 • 304.368.1123 marioncvb.com

NETWORKING CAPITAL

West Virginia Jobs Investment Trust 304.345.6200 • wvjit.org ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITIES Harrison County Development Authority 304.326.0213 • hcdawv.com Marion County Development Authority 304.367.5400 • www.marioncountywv.com Morgantown Area Economic Partnership / Monongalia County Development Authority 304.296.6684 • morgantown.org

WEST VIRGINIA DEVELOPMENT OFFICE 800.982.3386 • 304.558.2234 wvcommerce.org WEST VIRGINIA SMALL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CENTER MORGANTOWN OFFICE 304.293.5839 • sbdcwv.org

RESEARCH

CHAMBERS, MAIN STREETS

STATE TAX AND INCENTIVE INFO

Main Street Fairmont 304.366.0468 mainstreetfairmont.org

INVESTMENT FUNDS West Virginia Growth Investment wvgrowth.com

U.S. SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION WEST VIRGINIA DISTRICT OFFICE 304.623.5631 • sba.gov/wv

COMMUNITY INFO BUSINESS PARKS/ OFFICE SPACE

Harrison County Chamber of Commerce 304.624.6331 harrisoncountychamber.com

Main Street Morgantown 304.292.0168 • tourmorgantown.com Marion County Chamber of Commerce 304.363.0442 • marionchamber.com Morgantown Area Chamber of Commerce 304.292.3311 morgantownchamber.org ANNUAL INDUSTRY EVENTS SPRING

Appalachian Institute of Digital Evidence annual conference 304.696.7241 • appyide.org NOVEMBER

LIINC’s annual Security and Intelligence Research showcase 304.293.0391 innovation.research.wvu.edu/events

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Mission Critical Problem Solvers The NASA IV&V facility in Fairmont catches mission software malfunctions before they result in human or technical disaster.

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The maiden launch of space shuttle Challenger.

COURTESY OF NASA

WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

hile the most glamorous of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s missions might be located in Houston or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Fairmont houses what is arguably one of NASA’s most important divisions. The NASA Independent Verification and Validation Program reviews mission critical software for NASA missions before they even launch—in the hopes of preventing another Challenger-type accident, an ill-fated NASA mission that killed seven astronauts following hardware failure.

As a result of the investigation following the Challenger disaster, NASA IV&V was established in 1993 in Fairmont, under the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. There, IV&V serves at the vanguard of NASA’s mission integrity and human safety through its independent analysis of mission software. “Our program works on all high-profile missions across NASA,” says NASA IV&V spokesman Jeff Northey. “The missions gather interesting and crucial data that scientists need and we make sure they are working properly.” Is the software serving as it should? Will it respond properly in extreme conditions? These are the questions IV&V researchers use to identify a wide variety of software-related issues that, if left undiscovered, could result in human injury, loss of communication with the spacecraft, or even complete loss of the mission.

Some of IV&V’s more recent high-profile missions include the International Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as human exploration projects like ground system development and a multipurpose crew vehicle. “All of the missions are exciting and their science certainly has real-world applications,” Northey says. The James Webb telescope, for example, a multibillion dollar successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, will serve thousands of scientists around the world for the next decade. The telescope is set to launch in 2018.

The year 2016 will see the launch of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission— the Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-SecurityRegolith Explorer—with the goal of snapping up a sample of a near-Earth asteroid to bring back to the motherland for study. The Mars rover mission also went through IV&V, and while NASA’s eye

is on our planetary neighbor with long-term projects targeting its exploration and possible human habitation, the IV&V program also has its hands in more ground-level projects, including the tracking of Earth’s weather patterns and public emergency response upgrades.

Closer to home, NASA has partnered with NOAA on satellite data collection for climate and ecosystem analysis as well as transportation research. NASA is also participating in a global precipitation measurement project with the Japanese national space program to measure rain and snow patterns worldwide. “Data from that is being used to understand the global water cycle and storm structure. It’s one of the many projects we’ve provided support to,” Northey says.

All of these programs run software through IV&V for approval as a final check before system launch. “We’ve found a number of issues. Whether they would have made it into operations and caused a problem is debatable, but we find those kinds of potential problems frequently,” Northey says. Back on terra firma, the program is offering IV&V support to New York City for its new 911 system upgrade. The project is an effort to improve the quality of the city’s call taking and dispatch functions throughout its emergency services.

NASA IV&V employs approximately 320 people, 200 of whom are located in Fairmont with a mix of engineers—computer to electrical to aerospace—as well as software scientists, IT professionals, education outreach specialists, and more. Nearly $40 million each year goes into the program, which also acts as an important STEM educational resource for the state of West Virginia (page 74). Interns from nearby colleges and high schools work alongside researchers in system analysis, and the NASA Educator Resource Center partners with Fairmont State University to provide school kids with hands-on learning experiences in science and technology. “We have a big impact with our educational outreach activities and West Virginia benefits greatly from that,” Northey says. “NASA does a lot of exciting work, and it’s inspirational for people to know we’re making significant contributions to that work right here in West Virginia.”

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CuttingEdge Energy Research The National Energy Technology Laboratory in the heart of Morgantown is advancing the nation’s energy science.

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NETL scientists evaluate a photonic crystal optical fiber as a sensor for gaseous materials.

WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

Climate Study The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration brings its research facilities to Fairmont.

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WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

argantuan satellite antennas sit outside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building in Fairmont, ready to collect data for one of the agency’s newest climate projects. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R, GOES-R for short, is set to launch in 2015 as part of a program to study changing climate patterns. Its major support facility is located at the NOAA center in Fairmont.

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another concern is environmental factors. “Coal, for example, is an important domestic energy resource in the country, and we have portfolios of projects looking at how to capture carbon dioxide from the burning of coal so it isn’t admitted into the atmosphere,” Zeh says. “We have projects all the way from people looking at sorbents to get the carbon dioxide out of a gas stream to releasing it in a concentrated form to put it into storage.”

Millions of dollars spent across NETL ensure advanced research can take place. The Morgantown location hosts the organization’s supercomputer, accessible to researchers in Pittsburgh and Oregon.

In fiscal 2014, $835 million went to NETL for research in fossil energy, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other projects, and more than $30 million of that was conracted out to West Virginia’s small businesses. Zeh came to NETL more than 30 years ago with a background in chemical engineering. “The main reason I stayed is because I’ve had the opportunity to learn and work in a wide variety of different groups within the organization,” he says. “NETL provides an opportunity to work in cutting-edge research with the state-of-the-art facilities. If you’re a scientist or an engineer that’s a neat place to be.”

The organization might be best known for its National Weather Service products, informing weathermen and news media around the country of the latest severe weather, but NOAA’s arms also reach into natural habitat conservation, climate change, and oceanic and atmospheric research.

Arriving in 2010, NOAA is one of the most recent federal agencies to set up in the I-79 Technology Park Research Center in Fairmont. NOAA brought with it a $28 million supercomputing center that collects and analyzes climate data around the country. “NOAA has elevated this region in terms of importance on a national scale,” says Jim Estep, president and CEO of the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation. “We now are one of the two main ground stations in the country that will communicate with new satellites being launched to collect weather and climate data—it’s a real feather in the cap.”

COURTESY OF NETL; COURTESY OF WVHTC FOUNDATION

he Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has made one of its largest investments in North Central West Virginia. NETL makes up the national research arm of the DOE, developing tools and solutions for the country’s energy needs. One of three major NETL locations, the Morgantown site employs more than 250 federal and 350 contract personnel. The lab opened in Morgantown in the 1940s as the now defunct Bureau of Mines, and while NETL’s largest focus continues to center on fossil energy research, projects have grown to include renewables, efficiency, and reliability. “NETL has a long, rich history of cutting-edge research,” explains NETL’s acting COO Charles Zeh. “The lab continues to evolve, addressing new energy challenges as they emerge.”

The research conducted at NETL influences the future of U.S. energy programs. Twenty-five years ago the organization was looking at ways to extract natural gas from shale, which eventually opened up a formerly inaccessible domestic resource. Similarly, NETL’s research on sulfur dioxide emissions provided solutions for dealing with acid rain. The group’s high level goal is to advance energy technology to fuel economic growth and ensure an abundant energy supply, but

HARNESSING EXPERIENCE WVU Research Assistant Professor Thirimachos Bourlai (left) discusses his research with Jason Hodge of SecurLinx Integration Software.

Catalyzing Innovation

Morgantown-based fund West Virginia Growth Investment provides seed and early-stage capital to tech-based and other entrepreneurs. “We have 26 members now who have committed money,” says board Chairman Mike Green. “We’ve set out to do a $3 million fund. The idea is to find good companies that will help grow the job market and tax base in the state and this company is committed to putting people to work.” As much as money, entrepreneurs need management experience to back them up. “We are always reaching out to West Virginia expatriates retirees—if they’re interested they can come back and help our entrepreneurs.” wvgrowth.com

Mash-ups between creative risktakers from a range of fields spark the innovation community in North Central West Virginia.

A COURTESY OF WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

recession can take a long-term toll on companies’ internal research and development. A research university is the obvious next place to turn—but how? “Universities can seem like their own bubbles. It’s hard to find out what’s going on in Lab A and Lab B and Lab C,” says Lindsay Emery, business development manager for West Virginia University’s Office of Research and Economic Development. “Our LIINC program serves as a kind of front door to the university.”

Grounded in the observation that fruitful collaborations start with mutual awareness, LIINC—Linking Innovation, Industry, and Commercialization—acts as a matchmaker, a clearinghouse for faculty-student-industry-agency connections. Every year LIINC hosts showcase events to highlight research in each of its three primary focus areas: bioscience and biomedicine, energy and environment, and security and intelligence. The academic, industry, and government communities come together at the showcases to talk about research and applications.

Then, between showcases, Emery operates the switchboard.

“Companies might contact me to say, ‘Where do I go if I have a job description and I want a student with security clearance?’” she says.

And she facilitates connections that came out of the showcases. “I do countless email introductions to say, ‘So and so was interested in your work.’”

Wide-ranging good comes of LIINC that can otherwise be difficult to achieve—for example, the kinds of industry-academic collaborations federal grantmakers strongly encourage. “They can also create consulting opportunities for faculty members, licensing opportunities for the private sector, or job and internship opportunities for students,” Emery says. When connections end up involving intellectual property, “they need a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) and that goes through the university’s Office of Technology Transfer,” Emery says. “All sorts of NDAs have come from LIINC events.”

LIINC maintains close connections with the state’s venture capital community. Emery lists among them the INNOVA program at the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation, TechConnectWV, the West Virginia Jobs Investment Trust, and West Virginia Growth Investment.

“For a company coming into this area, particularly a small company where internal R&D is minimal or nonexistent, partnering with the university may prove very useful for them,” Emery says.

“We look forward to opportunities to translate the research we’re doing on campus to the outside world, and finding out what industry needs and creating tailored research around that.”

The University Economic Development Association chose LIINC as its Awards of Excellence winner in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship category in 2012. innovation.research.wvu.edu 21

KNOWING WHO’S REALLY WHO

The human brain can recognize the face of a distant acquaintance, an elderly aunt’s handwriting, or a long-lost friend’s gangly walk across a crowded airport. But it’s slow and muddled at matching other patterns—like fingerprints. Even as recently as the 1990s, an FBI fingerprint search could take months. The fact is, the full potential of biometric recognition wasn’t available to us until this century, when the sensing technologies have become affordable and the processing power fast. Only now can we dream of going beyond fingerprints to facial imaging, iris scans, voice recognition, gait analysis, DNA, and other identifying modalities—and of doing analysis from video and even in real time.

But how, exactly, does a computer “recognize” that two fingerprints among millions match? What does it have to “notice” about an iris or a face to “see” that two are the same?

How does it analyze and compare voices? And is there a faster, more accurate way than the best approach in use now? As the hardware has advanced, biometric software engineers trained and working in North Central West Virginia have been innovating answers to those questions. As the technologies migrate from law enforcement and homeland security to personal electronics and other commercial applications, ID Intel Ridge is ready to respond.

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IDENTIFICATION CENTRAL The largest criminal fingerprint repository in the world operates at the FBI’s facility in Clarksburg. More than a century old, it’s only getting bigger and better.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION CJIS DIVISION

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ust about every criminal in the United States, and just about every crime, lives on in infamy in one well guarded data center in North Central West Virginia. Housed 30 feet down and protected by a continuously patrolled ninemile perimeter, the data center stores the FBI’s fingerprint database—the largest criminal fingerprint repository in the world.

It may seem an unlikely location for one of the most high-tech, prime time icons of our times. The database is here because, in the 1980s, then-West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd knew the FBI’s collection of tens of millions of criminal fingerprint cards had outgrown its space in the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C. Byrd persuaded the agency it could have space and security and quality of life just over the hills in North Central West Virginia. In 1995 it established its Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS, “see-jis”) division on 1,000 rolling acres off of Interstate 79 outside Clarksburg, a one-hour flight or less than four hours’ drive from D.C. CJIS makes an Olympic sport of fast and accurate searching of massive crime datasets. When you buy a gun from a retailer, the seller checks your eligibility on CJIS’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System—a system that’s referenced 60,000 times a day, usually returning a “proceed,” “delay,” or “deny” response within minutes. When you’re pulled over and an officer takes your license and registration back to his cruiser, he’s accessing CJIS’s National Crime Information Center to discover whether your vehicle is stolen or you yourself are wanted for a crime; that database turns around 12 million queries a day almost instantly. Those are just two of many CJIS datasets law enforcement nationwide relies on for speed and certainty. “It’s all about providing criminal information to state and local agencies and our law enforcement community,” says CJIS Assistant Director Stephen Morris.

That fast search capability is applied with dazzling success to CJIS’s biometric identification services: the datasets that connect physical characteristics with identities with events. The division launched its first truly automated fingerprint database at its Clarksburg data center in 1999. The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) started out with about 40 million “tenprint” criminal fingerprint sets submitted by law enforcement agencies across the U.S. It fielded 40,000 queries each day from agencies seeking to confirm identities and criminal histories of arrested suspects, and to identify latent fingerprints left behind at crime scenes. IAFIS was also created to store and search civil prints, primarily of government workers, and to perform background checks on people who apply for visas and citizenship, government work, and jobs at day care centers and other positions of trust.

Because fingerprint matching has proven extraordinarily effective for confirming identity and solving crimes, CJIS’s biometric identification activities have grown from year to year. Today the division’s criminal fingerprint repository holds 76 million tenprint sets, nearly double its size in ’99, and receives quadruple the queries at more than 160,000 each day.

That’s just the beginning. As new biometric modalities approach the level of accuracy, convenience, and affordability of fingerprints, the agency is incorporating those into its services as well.

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At CJIS’s secure underground Systems Management Center, FBI analysts monitor the functioning of Next Generation Identification and other biometric repositories that serve law enforcement nationwide.

Next Generation Identification

To take advantage of advancements in computing power and biometric technologies, CJIS is finishing up a years-long transition to its Next Generation Identification system (NGI). Prime contractor Lockheed Martin rolled out the first increment of NGI in 2010 and is making upgrades in successive increments.

Early NGI increments replaced obsolete hardware, boosted accuracy, and slashed response time, among other improvements.

IAFIS was 92 percent accurate with, ultimately, an average half-hour turnaround time on criminal fingerprint checks and an hour and a quarter on civil checks. “That’s pretty good when you’re processing millions of fingerprints,” Morris points out. But today, he boasts, with NGI, the accuracy on “lights-out” matches—that’s computer matching with no human intervention—is 99.6 percent, with fiveminute turnaround time on criminal checks and under an hour on civil checks.

But to really move the database into the next generation, the buzz concept is multiple modalities, or the use of more than one biometric characteristic for identification. Multiple modalities make biometric identification far more accurate, Morris explains. “If you submit fingerprints, we can say we’re 99 percent sure who that is,” he says.

“If we also have a facial image, that’s the extra 1 percent we need to close the gap. With that, we can definitely say who it is.” It’s a challenge for CJIS, though. While some individual law enforcement agencies and networks with limited numbers of users are already working with more than one biometric modality, CJIS’s real strength lies in the sharing of information among the more than 18,000 local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide— so for CJIS to move to multiple modalities depends on new technologies not only being developed, but becoming standardized and affordable.

NGI is ready as that takes place. In its Increment 3 rollout in 2013, it added palm print matching capability. About 30 percent of the prints left at crime scenes are palm prints, and the National Palm Print System now offers law enforcement nationwide new

“It’s all about providing criminal information to state and local agencies and our law enforcement community.”

STEPHEN MORRIS CJIS Assistant Director

The 360,000-square-foot Biometric Technology Center will put training, conference, office, and development facilities for the FBI’s and Department of Defense’s joint biometric research all under one roof in 2015.

opportunities to identify suspects. The technology most requested by state and local law enforcement—facial image recognition—came up next. Following a 2012 Interstate Photo System Face Recognition Pilot program with a half dozen agencies, NGI Increment 4 made facial recognition available nationwide for the first time in 2014 to agencies that have the technology to participate. It also added national-level searches of photos of scars, marks, and tattoos. And capability to search iris scans is built in, but that isn’t expected to be widely available for years.

Increment 4 expanded CJIS’s biometric capabilities on the civil side, too. A new subscription service the division calls Rap Back will eliminate the need for repeat civil background checks by allowing schools, nursing homes, and others employing people in positions of trust to receive notifications if their background-checked employees are ever arrested.

Biometric Technology Center

As its biometric identification services expanded, CJIS outgrew the 530,000 square feet of facilities it occupied in 1995. A new, 360,000-square-foot Biometric Technology Center set to open in 2015 on the Clarksburg campus anticipates the direction of the division’s work in biometric identification.

That direction includes a deep level of collaboration. The Biometric Technology Center will place CJIS’s biometric work under one roof with that of the Department of Defense’s Biometrics Identity Management Activity (BIMA). It’s a recognition of the growing mutual support of the biometric databases developed separately by the Department of Justice, through CJIS, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security. “If someone comes to us from a law enforcement agency and says, ‘Hey, we’re looking at this guy and we want to know if he has a criminal history,’ 27

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as they do thousands of times a day, we’ll search our holdings on that guy,” Morris says by way of example. “And they might also say, ‘We also believe he’s from another country and may have traveled here 12 years ago under this name.’ Now we have the ability to send a query about that to Homeland Security. Seven or eight years ago that could only be done in a one-off way, but not in the automatic, lights-out way we can do it today.” Similar reciprocities are becoming more and more common among all three departments. By hosting BIMA in CJIS’s Biometric Technology Center, Morris expects both departments to gain efficiencies. “Whenever you can put people who share a common task physically together in one location, the synergy you get from that generates success a lot faster,” he says.

The future direction also includes trying new ideas: The facility will house the FBI’s Biometric Center of Excellence (BCOE). “Building on our legacy expertise with the fingerprint program, we’re looking at research and development,” Morris explains. “What technologies could do the same thing for facial recognition and other biometric modalities? We’re working with private industry, with academics, with other government agencies, and more importantly with the 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies out there to see what they need—what really has application for our law enforcement and national security missions.”

FACIAL RECOGNITION The summer 2014 rollout of NGI Increment 4 included facial recognition, a capability that has been clamored for by law enforcement. As the FBI was preparing to move from pilot to full operation, CJIS Information Technology Specialist Brendan Forst demonstrated the Universal Face Workstation interface CJIS developed to provide to state and local law enforcement partners.

“The user will be able to drag and drop a photo into a new case file, with a short description about what the case pertains to,” Forst says. “They’ll have access to some image enhancement tools—here we can rotate it, or crop it down to just the face. You notice as I do this it’s recording the image history so, if there’s ever a question of, ‘What did you do to the image to get your candidate list?’ they’ll have that.” The user can also narrow the search by age range, gender, hair color, and height, although Forst recommends searching first without filters. When the user finishes and clicks “submit,” the software packages it and sends it off to CJIS in West Virginia.

Once the system receives the query, it’ll process the image using face geometry— keying in on the position of the eyes and mapping various points off of that—as well as skin tone and texture and other algorithms, and return a candidate list, each one with an FBI Universal Control Number that ties it to the agency’s fingerprint record.

Conceived as an investigative and not an identification search, the system will return two or more candidates with a target turnaround time of 15 minutes.

The facial recognition system kicked off with about 19 million criminal mug shots in its database, but it’s expected to grow quickly. “Make no mistake—this will catch fire,” says Nick Megna, unit chief of the NGI Program Office. “States are saying, ‘Please, we need this capability.’ We expect to get a lot more mug shots submitted soon.”

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THE FBI CRIMINAL JUSTICE INFORMATION SERVICES’ FINGERPRINT REPOSITORY An early increment of the upgrade from IAFIS to NGI moved the fingerprint repository from superdomes to these more compact blades. CJIS’s 50,000-square-foot, temperature-controlled data center holds aisles and aisles of blades.

STORAGE

The Future

NGI’s built-in readiness for emerging technologies leaves the future of CJIS’s biometric identification activities wide open. Increment 5 introduced an Iris Pilot Project, for example. Widespread use of iris recognition awaits generally available technology, but CJIS and its software developers see that on the horizon. And voice recognition is among the modalities undergoing research at the BCOE. Locating in Clarksburg was a good move for CJIS, Morris says.

Turnover among the division’s 2,500 or so employees is just 2 to 3 percent each year, compared with 25 percent in Washington, D.C. The agency recognized West Virginia University’s prime position in biometric research in 2008 by naming the university its lead academic partner for biometrics, and Morris says the agency maintains a close relationship with the university and targets local graduates for recruitment.

Employees enjoy the area’s quality of life and the division’s work, he says. “We’re doing a lot of firsts here. To be a part of that, and also have a sense of service to your country—I don’t know where else you could get that. it’s very gratifying.”

He only sees biometrics expanding in West Virginia. “I wasn’t in California in the early ’80s, but I have to believe the growth and expansion we see here generated from biometrics and national security is similar to what was going on in Silicon Valley in the ’70s and ’80s,” he says. “Twenty years from now, if not sooner, when people think of biometrics and identity management, they’re going to see this I-79 Corridor as the birthplace of all that.” ID

The Next Generation Identification system holds prints and criminal histories for 76 million subjects—more than onefifth of the U.S. population, and growing by 12,000 sets of prints every day—along with more than 600,000 prints lifted from crime scenes in its Unsolved Latent File. It also maintains a database of more than 40 million civil fingerprints, mostly of government workers, and more than 73,000 prints of known and suspected terrorists.

PROCESSING

CJIS receives more than 160,000 identification and criminal history queries every day. About half are criminal checks and about half are civil.

TURNAROUND TIME

Criminal prints, 5 minutes. Civil prints, less than one hour.

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WARFIGHTER IN SUPPORT OF THE

The Department of Defense uses biometrics to identify terrorists and insurgents, protecting U.S. soldiers abroad. But when Defense’s biometric database works with Justice’s and Homeland Security’s, they’re all more powerful.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

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ore than 3,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the field by improvised explosive devices. IEDs could be an anonymous and almost riskless act of violence for the killer, except for one thing: Bomb fragments retain fingerprints. Or if military personnel find a remote detonator in the field, they can sometimes recover the prints of its maker or user.

Matched against records in the Department of Defense’s biometric database, latent fingerprints like these identify terrorists—and lead to their capture.

“We had what we called a ‘superhit’ a few years ago,” says Vincent Johns, acting director of the DOD’s Biometrics Identity Management Activity (BIMA), in illustration of the potential for biometrics on the battlefield. “This individual was connected to 154 latent prints from 42 separate IED cases over a two-year period. We caught that guy.”

DOD’s use of biometrics is embodied in the motto “Deny the Enemy Anonymity,” and it’s carried out in Clarksburg, where BIMA maintains and operates the department’s Automated Biometric Information System. ABIS stores fingerprints and other identifiers collected from military detainees, prisoners of war, and terrorist suspects around the world, along with latent prints collected from bombs and scenes of other hostile activity.

The Value of Interoperability

DOD’s biometrics activities first came into West Virginia with the establishment of the agency’s Biometrics Fusion Center (BFC) in Bridgeport in 2001. The choice of location put it near the FBI’s criminal fingerprint repository, which the Department of Justice had located in adjacent Clarksburg a decade earlier. The BFC was a temporary operation created primarily to test biometric devices. But following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the BFC’s focus shifted to enhancing the security of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The greatest problem they have over there is trying to determine who’s who on the battlefield,” then-BFC Director Sam Cava explained at a conference in 2005—for example, when boarding ships on the high seas. “Traditionally they’d go up and say, ‘Do you have any terrorists on board?’” he laughed. It was a wry joke that underlined the difficulty of protecting U.S. soldiers in unconventional war

zones, where combatants may wear civilian clothing and blend in with the general public. “We’re trying to add one more tool to the toolkit to help establish identities.” Working with the FBI, the BFC in 2004 created ABIS: a repository of biometric data collected in military operations, patterned after the FBI’s renowned Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).

ABIS now contains more than 280,000 latent fingerprints. Here’s how that helps the U.S. warfighter distinguish friend from foe. Say a soldier submits a fingerprint, via satellite, collected from a local who’s waiting to pass at a military checkpoint. “If it matches one of these latent prints, things can be set in motion,” Johns says.

“They can apprehend that person or, if they already have them in custody, they can keep them in custody.” ABIS also helps with the orderly establishment of local peacekeeping by keeping insurgents out of positions of sensitivity or power. Some Iraqis applying to be trained at the Iraqi Police Academy, for example, have matched records in ABIS. A surprising and valuable insight came from early comparisons of war zone biometrics with the FBI’s database of U.S. criminal fingerprints. Some people fingerprinted in Iraq and Afghanistan, it turned out, already had criminal histories in this country: For example, more than one out of 100 detainees fingerprinted in Afghanistan in late 2001 appeared in the FBI’s database for earlier arrests in the U.S. “The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here,” wrote The Washington Post in 2008.

That insight led to greater collaboration between the departments of Defense and Justice and also later with the Department of Homeland Security, which keeps a biometric database to help enforce immigrations and customs laws. Each of the three repositories is designed to support its department’s particular mission, but interoperability makes all three more powerful.

Because of its success in the military theater, biometrics has come up through the ranks of the DOD. The temporary BFC evolved into today’s BIMA, a major branch of the Defense Forensic and Biometric Agency that was created in 2013.

BIMA’s Future

A massive 2009 software system upgrade turned the 2004 ABIS prototype into a leading edge, multimodal biometric system, with support for tenprints, palm prints, iris scans, and facial images. That version of ABIS, created by Northrop Grumman, saw so much use that it was already well over its planned capacity by 2014, storing 12 million biometric records on 7 million individuals and fielding 15,000 queries each day. While it remained efficient—it matched more than half a million identities in fiscal 2013 and, according to Johns, only about 10 percent of queries required manual processing—the system is undergoing another upgrade, to ABIS 1.2, designed to store 18 million records and manage double the daily transaction volume.

Those 15,000 queries per day are, of course, not all internal to the DOD. The collaboration with the departments of Justice and Homeland Security continually grows, and BIMA has added other interagency and international partners as well. “Over the past five years the submissions from interagency partners have gone from just a handful to more than a third of our annual submissions,” Johns says. “That tells me our interoperability is gaining ground—and we are more cooperative and therefore more relevant.”

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About 170 work at BIMA’s office, now located in Clarksburg. A handful are government civilians, while most are employees of the contractors that provide services to BIMA. “Contractors are involved in every facet of this organization. They’re vital,” Johns says.

“They’re biometric and forensic experts, many of them graduates of West Virginia University and Marshall University. They’re also database administrators and software engineers, and also the folks that fill in the whole host of administrative functions any organization needs.” BIMA has also sponsored college interns, who often are later hired by contractors they’ve worked alongside.

While Johns can’t predict the scale of BIMA’s future operations— “we expand and contract to handle our global requirements”—he notes its coming move. In an even deeper acknowledgement of the value of interagency cooperation, BIMA joins the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division in 2015 in the 360,000-squarefoot Biometrics Technology Center under construction on the FBI’s Clarksburg campus. “Working with our sister agencies is proving very valuable for protecting our borders,” Johns says. “We have a planned, sustained presence in North Central West Virginia.” ID PREVIOUS PAGE AND TOP: U.S. soldiers capture fingerprints in the field and send them by satellite to the Department of Defense’s biometric repository in Clarksburg. ABOVE: Taking an iris scan.

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WVU CITeR students capture fingerprints for their biometric database.

MAKING THE FUTURE

The security and convenience of the future are in development now at the Center for Identification Technology Research at West Virginia University.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY PHOTOGRAPHED BY ELIZABETH ROTH

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Well, it’s happened.

While you were chatting up the barista in hopes of a free refill, someone swiped your phone from your table.

Pockets, bag, chair, counter, bag, pockets, BAG—and then you remember. You have a new security app. Sure enough, there’s already an email on your laptop with a photo the app took of the thief when he failed to log on, along with GPS coordinates. Local authorities got the same information. The photo is blurry and poorly lit, but the FBI’s powerful face recognition software identifies the thief as a past offender and, within hours, the police nab him at home.

Face recognition from less-than-ideal photos is just the kind of frontier researchers are pushing at the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) at West Virginia University—frontiers that protect soldiers and law enforcement, simplify access to everything from computers to homes and offices, and tighten the security of bricks-and-mortar and online commerce. It’s all about fine-tuning identification technology: Can a computer still recognize your face when you wear a mustache, or lots of makeup, or different glasses? Can it recognize your voice even when you talk with a funny accent or high emotion?

Just as importantly, can it do all that efficiently? “There are a lot of different ways to skin the cat,” says WVU CITeR Director Matthew Valenti. “One of the things we do in CITeR is, for a given problem, try to find the best way to do it”—that is, not only the most accurate, but also the fastest, using technology that’s reasonably available and acceptable to potential users.

Supporting that work is what CITeR believes is the largest biometric research database in the world. “We’ve had students collecting biometric samples over the past 10 years,” says former director Bojan Cukic. “Fingerprints, palm prints, hand geometry, irises, faces with expressions, voices with variations. It gives students experience collecting data, plus it’s created this huge research database—now over 7 terabytes.” CITeR students and faculty can test the biometrics software they develop against the vast range of, say, fingerprints and human iris patterns, and also against earlier and later biometric impressions that show the true physiological effects of aging and scarring. “No one else in the world has such a resource,” Cukic says. “This positions us to be leaders in this research for a very long time.”

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Students capture iris scans.

CITeR got its start at WVU in 2002. The FBI had relocated its large criminal fingerprint repository from D.C. to nearby Clarksburg in the 1990s, animating the region’s potential as a hub for biometrics.

Today CITeR encompasses eight faculty from electrical and computer engineering, statistics, and even pharmacy as well as 25 graduate and several postdoctoral students conducting research, and enjoys 2,800 square feet of dedicated research space.

But CITeR is a lot more than that. As a National Science Foundation (NSF) center organized on a proven model for addressing the research needs of industry and government, it’s a nationwide, four-university collaborative that’s turning out useful solutions.

COURTESY OF WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

The Importance of Being an I/UCRC

“One of the things we do in CITeR is, for a given problem, try to find the best way to do it.”

MATTHEW VALENTI WVU CITeR Director

Say you own or represent a technology-based company. Now imagine you and colleagues in your industry get to explain your problems directly to leading scientists in your field—and they’re eager to solve them. That’s the essence of an NSF Industry and University Cooperative Research Center, or I/UCRC. “It’s a shared research cooperative,” Valenti explains. “We do the research with inputs from our industry and government affiliates, and in doing so we create a pool of knowledge that can be shared amongst all of our constituents.” Each advising organization pays an annual fee to have a hand in the selection of research topics and access to the outcomes.

It’s an arrangement that creates tight linkages between development and application, and also between graduate student training and workforce need.

That means the research is relevant. “It’s not just us sitting in our ivory tower twiddling our thumbs thinking of things to research,” Valenti says. “We have people out there using these systems who can tell us where the knowledge gaps are and what kinds of research we can do to fill in those gaps.” It’s cost-effective, too. “Although the level of funding of these centers is relatively low, the intellectual output in terms of product is much higher than you typically find otherwise,” Cukic says.

An I/UCRC also exposes students directly to the workforce needs of the industry they’re about to enter—and that gives them an edge.

Nick Bartlow, who earned a Ph.D. in WVU’s Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in 2009, says CITeR gave him the opportunity to work with researchers at the forefront of biometrics. “Like many others before and after me, these opportunities heavily contributed to landing both a competitive internship and gainful employment upon graduation,” Bartlow says.

He now works as senior principal software engineer, addressing issues in biometrics at the Bridgeport, West Virginia, office of the nonprofit research corporation Noblis. Students who work with CITeR are prepared to contribute to the toughest problems in identification intelligence, he says.

Successful I/UCRCs grow. They attract university members, and each university member brings additional affiliates. From its start at WVU, CITeR has added sites at the University of Arizona in 2007, Clarkson University in upstate New York in 2011, and the University at Buffalo in 2013; Michigan State University acts now as a partner and is working toward full membership. Among its more than 25 affiliates, the center lists the biggest names in biometrics: units of the federal departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice—the three that maintain major biometric repositories—as well as the leading corporate names in identification technology and some smaller names as well. “The center is growing,” Cukic says.

“The amount of research is growing and the cumulative results of the center are becoming more significant.”

Brought on in mid-2014 as the center’s third director, Valenti brings to CITeR a background in wireless communications, highperformance computing, and signal processing. He also has a particular interest in steering a group of researchers and interacting with affiliates.

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Innovations

Two start-up companies so far have come out of inventions created at or in collaboration with WVU, Cukic says.

NexID Biometrics of Potsdam, New York, has licensed WVU patents in the area of fingerprint liveness detection—technology that ensures a fingerprint presented for verification is part of a person rather than a fake. “That company has grown over the past seven years,” Cukic says. “It adjusts the product to the sensors provided by its clients and it counts most major biometric companies as its clients. It’s now also moving its products from the high-end security products used by governments and high security to cell phones’ and smartphones’ fingerprint scanners.”

The other company, EyeVerify of Kansas City, Kansas, has licensed a patent that was created at WVU and at the University of Missouri–Kansas City for technology that recognizes an individual using the patterns of veins in the sclera, or the white part of the eye. “The company is using what they call Eyeprint to authenticate transactions starting from the cell phone. So if your phone has a front camera, you put it in front of your face and look to the side. The camera captures the sclera, and you’re authenticated—no fingerprint, no password, no weird swipe over different points on the screen,” Cukic says. “That company has grown to 40 to 50 people, and they cannot stop the influx of venture capital.”

Other technologies created through CITeR have been licensed commercially as well. CITeR-funded technology developed at Michigan State University identifies mutilated fingerprints, alerting law enforcement or border guards that further investigation is warranted. “This is especially important in fighting organized crime because drug dealers and other offenders often destroy their fingerprints in order not to be identified,” Cukic says. Also developed at MSU with support from CITeR is software for the automated recognition of tattoos. “Historically, if an offender had a tattoo, law enforcement agencies would describe it in the file and they might take a picture, but the comparison would have to be done by humans. Now that comparison can be done by computers,” he says. “Both of those technologies have been licensed to a major multinational company and they are being used by the U.S. government. Those have been great successes.” citer.wvu.edu

ABOVE: A graphic design student alters images to test the limits of automated face recognition. RIGHT: Measuring hand geometry. Research Assistant Professor Jeremy Dawson studies the unique mixes of bacteria on individuals’ hands.

CITeR WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

is CITeR’s founding site and focuses on biometrics and related identification technology and systems.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

came on in 2007; it focuses on automated credibility assessment systems.

CLARKSON UNIVERSITY

specializes in biometric vulnerabilities and intelligence; it became the lead site in 2011.

THE UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO,

The State University of New York, new in 2013, focuses on handwriting, cryptography, and soft biometrics such as skin color and height.

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PREPARING STUDENTS Graduates of WVU’s Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering all get some level of exposure to biometrics-related areas such as computer security, image processing, and surveillance systems. The department grants as many as 20 Bachelor of Science degrees each year in biometric systems— the first biometrics degree program in the nation—and overall awards 120 BS degrees and 80 advanced degrees in any given year. Students who pursue careers in biometrics can intern locally with private firms or, with the needed security clearance, with the departments of Justice and Defense and their contractors.

Many find permanent jobs with those organizations after graduation.

CITeR students photograph faces at angles and with eyes open and closed. Closed-eye recognition aids in post-mortem identification.

Trends

Research is a forward-looking enterprise. Cukic, who left his position as WVU CITeR director in August 2014, and Valenti, who succeeded him, share what they see coming in biometrics.

Both name among the biggest trends “the integration of biometrics into everyday life,” in Valenti’s words. “Getting away from having all these many passwords,” Cukic elaborates. “Right now we are in an ‘El Dorado’ environment in which new miniature sensors are emerging on the market every month, and where cell phone companies and device manufacturers are chasing the latest and greatest biometrics for inclusion in their tablets and smartphones—it’s simply the most exciting commercial trend you can see out there,” he says. Industry affiliates are guiding CITeR to provide solutions for the use of fingerprints, facial recognition, and eyeprints for controlling access to and transactions from handheld devices, and it’s a challenge. “The processing power in a smartphone is much lower than the processing power in a dedicated computer.

The biometric algorithms were computationally demanding and now they need to be simplified to work with sensors that capture a smaller surface of the finger, possibly lower-resolution images, where the quality is not all that good,” Cukic says. “All of these factors are influencing the research in biometric sensors and algorithms.”

Some other trends will probably first see government application.

Valenti notes the coming use of DNA as a biometric identifier. “Right 40

now the state of the art might be an hour turnaround time,” he says, “but we’re trying to drive that down to the point where it can be used in much the same way you use fingerprints.” He speculates early adopters will be law enforcement and the military. Cukic points to mass analysis of casual civilian photos—for example, the hundreds of thousands of photos sent to the FBI after the April 2013 Boston bombings. “You may or may not know the exact angles of collection, you may or may not know in which order they have been taken, and it represents petabytes of information—not gigabytes, not terabytes, literally petabytes of information,” he says. The ability to analyze such a mass of images could help with disaster relief, he notes. “You could use this for identifying victims but also for identifying people who’ve been dislocated or finding missing children—all of these uses are now coming to the forefront.”

If all this gives you concerns about privacy, it might ease your mind to know that’s part of the trends, too. “Your face reveals a lot about you,” Cukic says. “One of our faculty members created an algorithm in which he can create anyone’s face from pictures of two other faces—say, their two favorite actors or actresses. By knowing the transformation and retracting it, we can now perform recognition in a process that’s fully anonymized.” What’s known in the field as “de-identification” can anonymize most of the uses of biometrics, Cukic says. “That’s where I see the field going.” ID

Lean, Mean Software Engineering Lakota Software Solutions aims to be that 20 percent.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

COURTESY OF LAKOTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

T

he son of a career Navy man, software engineer Aaron Wilson wanted to stand up for his country after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He saw in biometrics a way he could give back without exposing his family to the challenges of the military life he’d grown up in. Lakota Software Solutions rose in 2007 out of that idea.

It also rose out of a drive for efficiency. Wilson and colleague Phillip Merritt saw plenty of waste in government contracting earlier in their careers. “We found ourselves always surrounded by the same 20 percent of the people doing 80, 90 percent of the work,” Merritt says. “We said, ‘Let’s stand up a company to be that 20 percent and only hire the best of the best.’”

Based in Fairmont, Lakota supports the development of the very large federal automated biometric systems that promote national security and law enforcement every day. Its engineers have played key roles in creating the Department of Defense’s Automated Biometric Information System (ABIS) and the FBI’s Next Generation Information (NGI) system. Between them, Lakota’s principals—President and CEO Wilson, Senior Biometric Software Engineer Merritt, and Vice President Travis Lambert—have been on staff at both Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, the prime contractors on those federal agencies’ systems, and Lakota now has subcontracts with both companies.

Asked about the value of Lakota’s work, Wilson and Merritt show how much they enjoy what they do. “We’re more than twice as fast as any other WSQ provider on the market right now,” Wilson says without hesitation. That’s Wavelet Scalar Quantization, the compression algorithm the FBI uses for grayscale fingerprint images.

“Think of a system that has to process hundreds of thousands of transactions in a day and each has to decode 20 fingerprint images.

Every millisecond you can save will make the system respond that much faster. The performance of our software increases overall system performance.”

Think, too, about how the system is used, Merritt jumps in. “Some police officers on the street are now carrying mobile collection devices to collect fingerprints and send them to the system for identification,” he says. “The performance really matters—you don’t want to sit on the interstate waiting on a response to come back. We provide core software that allows it to happen more quickly.” Wilson extends Merritt’s example overseas, where U.S. soldiers in war zones await identification responses. “Do they take this person into

Based in Fairmont, Lakota supports the development of the very large federal automated biometric systems that promote national security and law enforcement every day.

custody or let them go?” he asks. “Seconds will probably seem like hours to them in the danger zones.”

Performance with WSQ is just one example. Both engineers enthuse about Lakota’s end-to-end solution where others piece theirs together, about its first-in-the-industry certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and about its alsofirst Java implementation to run on Android phones.

The company is exploring the commercial side of biometrics as well. One example is a mobile biometric collection system for entities that need to electronically capture fingerprints or facial images and submit them in the required format. “We have software to do it FBIand NIST-compliant,” Wilson says. “Clients could be state and local police departments and, on the commercial side, any company that’s doing work for the federal government that has a requirement for personnel clearances.”

Lakota currently employs nine. Of operating in North Central West Virginia, Merritt notes that WVU’s leading role in biometrics education makes it possible for companies in the area to hire locally.

Wilson points out other advantages for government contractors.

“The cost of office space and services is much lower here than in D.C., so your overhead costs are much lower,” he says.

Established 2007 Located in Bridgeport lakotasoftware.com

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Through the Repository of Individuals of Special Concern (RISC), officers in the field can use mobile systems to scan two fingers and query NGI’s “worst of the worst” database for quick threat assessments.

Critical System Support for Law Enforcement Lockheed Martin migrated the FBI from its iconic criminal fingerprint database used ’round the clock by jurisdictions nationwide to a far more sophisticated system—apparently seamlessly.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

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COURTESY OF FBI CJIS DIVISION

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s you and your partner drive along in your police cruiser, the car ahead of you weaves out of its lane. When it happens again, you flip your lights on and pull the driver over. As always, your approach to the vehicle is an awkward, suspenseful moment. Is the driver going to be apologetic? Drunk? Hostile and unpredictable?

Traffic stops pose inherent risks for law enforcement. But as part of a larger project, FBI contractor Lockheed Martin created a system that, since 2011, has taken those risks down a notch. It’s called RISC: the Repository for Individuals of Special Concern.

“People will often not have identification or will lie about their identity,” says Lockheed Next Generation Identification Program Manager Art Ibers. “RISC allows an officer with a handheld fingerprint device to send two fingerprints from the squad car through a wireless network to our database.” It’s an FBI database of wanted criminals, known and suspected terrorists, and others of special concern. “The system responds within about 20 seconds with red, yellow, or green—a hit, a potential threat, or no threat. It’s been effective at giving police officers a really quick read on whether this person is a threat.”

Upgrading an American Icon

RISC is part of a $1.2 billion, years-long, highly technical upgrade that affects the 18,000 local, state, federal, and tribal law enforcement agencies nationwide. From 2008 to 2014, Lockheed took the FBI from its famed 24/7 Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) repository, vintage 1999, to the new Next Generation Identification system. “NGI becomes the bigger, better, faster IAFIS,” Ibers says.

The upgrade was so big that Lockheed carried it out in increments.

NGI’s first incremental rollout, in 2011, took the accuracy of the FBI’s signature fingerprint matching system from 92 percent to better than 99 percent, Ibers says, while also improving turnaround time.

The second got RISC up and rolling. Successive increments through 2014 made the FBI’s biometric identification systems “multimodal,” creating the first national palm print system and later adding facial recognition, along with future capacity to incorporate iris scans and other identifying modalities as technologies mature. “Those are the big chunks,” Ibers says. “After that we’re in the operations and maintenance phase.”

IAFIS held fingerprints for more than 70 million criminals at the time of the migration and received tens of thousands of queries each day. It’s relied upon so widely that it’s become an iconic part of American culture, an assumed piece of knowledge for watching any of perhaps dozens of popular crime dramas. An interruption in service would make major national news. While neither Lockheed nor the FBI would comment publicly on the success of the upgrade to NGI, the migration is a clear case of “no news is good news.”

COURTESY OF LOCKHEED MARTIN

Working in West Virginia

About 30 Lockheed employees support the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) division in Clarksburg. It’s just part of the global, Washington, D.C., area-based aerospace and defense contractor’s presence of about 160 in the state, many of whom build parts of the C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft or conduct energy-related research and development.

A number of smaller businesses support Lockheed in its work with CJIS. “We have a small business requirement on the program that we’re far exceeding simply because of the skills and talent of the folks working in the area,” Ibers says. Lockheed’s locally headquartered subcontractors include Agile5 Technologies, Innovative Management and Technology Services, and Lakota Software Solutions of Fairmont as well as Fusion Technology of Bridgeport; Global Science and Technology of Greenbelt, Maryland, also supports Lockheed from its Fairmont office. Lockheed hires interns locally, too. Lockheed has always been pleased with the workforce in North Central West Virginia, Ibers says. “We do challenging work and we have been able to find the talent need. We have never struggled to find talent.”

Lockheed employees enjoy the lifestyle in West Virginia. “If you talk to our people they’ll tell you the quality of life along the I-79 corridor is excellent. There’s a really strong sense of community and I think people enjoy the benefits of being near a major university,” Ibers says. “People also like the physical and geographical beauty of the place. Most people who are in West Virginia speak highly of its qualities to our other teams.”

“We have a small business requirement on the program that we’re far exceeding simply because of the skills and talent of the folks working in the area.”

ART IBERS Lockheed Next Generation Identification Program Manager

Lockheed’s Future in the State

If Lockheed’s activities in the area are any indication, it’s here to stay. “We invest in the community because we believe this is an area where we want to continue to do business,” Ibers says. The company participates in K-12 STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—events, for example, and has contributed resources to nearby Fairmont State University’s National Security and Intelligence program.

It also supports an annual scholarship program at West Virginia University. “We provide $10,000 to their biometrics program, and then we’ll ask students to produce an essay on some part of the biometrics domain, whether policy or technology,” Ibers explains.

“Those are evaluated by a panel representing us and the university, and then we give two or three scholarships from that $10,000. It’s a good opportunity to continue to invest in the biometrics engine that WVU is.”

Lockheed historically worked on the Department of Defense’s ABIS biometric repository and expects to pursue future opportunities with DOD biometrics in West Virginia. And Ibers sees a continuing commitment to CJIS. “We’re building a significant system and we’re seeing it make a difference to the nation,” he says. “People have rallied around that. As CJIS goes into the future, we believe there’s more opportunity and we’re certainly interested in helping CJIS build the next big system to make our country safer.”

Formed out of a 1995 merger Headquartered in Bethesda, MD lockheedmartin.com

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Testing Devices, Advancing New Technologies Valerie Evanoff’s career path has carried her company, CrossResolve, into an enviable niche.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

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or lots of unsolved crimes, the only trace of the criminal is biological: a little saliva, some skin cells, a drop of blood.

A killer who’s on the loose might be arrested over and over for other offenses but, without the right technology, police can never connect her with that open case. Now, Rapid DNA could change all that—and CrossResolve of Morgantown is at the forefront.

CrossResolve provides advisory expertise in the areas of biometrics, forensics, and identity intelligence. “It’s a focused content area,” says founder and CEO Valerie Evanoff, “but we have a broad customer base.” That base includes military and civilian federal agencies as well as private-sector companies.

The core of CrossResolve’s work is in the testing and evaluation of biometric applications. “The government might say, ‘We need a fingerprint device and we’re thinking about which hardware and software to use. Can you tell us what makes the most sense for us?’ We’d look at their budget and short-term and long-term goals, analyze alternatives, and test potential devices in an environment that simulates their application.” It’s a capacity Evanoff gained at the National Biometric Security Project, where she led the testing and standards-setting division in the mid-2000s. “Or if a client is looking to use new methods for physical security or for access to systems and services, we help them evaluate return on investment, ease of use— all the things that go into a decision about how and whether to use biometrics.” Because CrossResolve doesn’t sell biometric products, she says, it serves as an impartial voice for smart business decisions.

CrossResolve works with established and emerging biometrics— fingerprints and face, iris, and voice recognition. But it’s pushing the

Established in 2012 Located in Morgantown crossresolve.com

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“If a client is looking to use new methods for physical security or for access to systems and services, we help them evaluate return on investment.”

VALERIE EVANOFF CEO, CrossResolve

frontier with Rapid DNA, a technology Evanoff learned well earlier as a founding member of the FBI’s Rapid DNA Program Office. Currently available in devices the size of a laser printer, the technology takes DNA profiling from weeks to hours—a meaningful difference. “Say they’ve made an arrest on a felony in a state where it’s legally permissible to collect DNA at arrest,” she says. That includes just over half of states now. “They’ll swab the inside of the person’s cheek with what looks like a Q-tip, place that in the machine, and get a DNA profile while the person is still in the booking environment. The vision is that the profile could be evaluated against the national DNA database and, if they get a hit on an unsolved case, they have the person already in custody. It’s going to change the face of policing.”

Rapid DNA could turn what has been exclusively a forensic tool into a biometric tool, Evanoff says—that is, expland its use from eventually linking people with events to quickly identifying people at checkpoints or during brief detentions. The departments of Homeland Security and Defense are interested, among others. She acknowledges tough policy and legal obstacles. While federal law requires that DNA samples entered into the national database come from accredited labs, for example, Rapid DNA is expected to remove profile generation from the lab environment entirely. “It’s definitely a revolutionary technology facing numerous integration challenges,” she says. “But I think in the next five to seven years we’re going to see a greater potential for broad implementation.”

Starting a high-tech business in North Central West Virginia has been a good experience for Evanoff. “There’s a tight-knit community of businesspeople here who work to mentor other companies,” she says. “I’ve been fortunate to have other companies take me under their wing, by opening doors to people I didn’t know or helping me optimize my business structure. I’ve found diligent support.”

SBA designation as an Economically Disadvantaged, WomanOwned Small Business gives CrossResolve a boost with government procurement. But Evanoff is also pressing into the commercial sector. “Government dollars are tight and programs start and end all the time, and it’s difficult to build a business in that space alone,” she says. “To thrive during a government shutdown like we saw in 2013, we turned more to the private sector.”

The biometrics work conducted in North Central West Virginia is catching criminals and identifying adversaries at home and around the world, Evanoff says, and the industry is taking note.

“Large companies that have out-of-state offices are coming in,” she says. “Companies from D.C. and Virginia, the beltway area, they know they have to have a presence here, and they’re finding the connectivity and services and people they need.”

Security and Flexibility SecurLinx Integration Software is meeting the identification needs of government and law enforcement while waiting for the commercial market for biometrics to develop.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

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overnments of emerging nations that never built big bureaucracies based on paper records represent a particular opportunity for the biometrics industry. “I call it leap-frogging, in the global development sense,” says Jason Hodge, vice president of SecurLinx Integration Software of Morgantown. “These countries don’t need to establish social security number systems, for example—they can just issue a national ID card that has a fingerprint on a chip.” It’s a market SecurLinx is well positioned to tap.

SecurLinx’s primary product is identity management software that gives customers broad flexibility. Unlike biometrics solutions that tie a particular piece of software to a particular fingerprint sensor or iris scanning device, SecurLinx’s IdentiTrac manages inputs from the range of devices and modalities. “We’re not trying to sell hardware,” says Hodge. “Our job in helping customers get to a solution to an identity management problem is knowing all the devices—knowing that, if the fingerprint device that’s going to sign you up to get into your office is going to be on an administrator’s desk, it can be a $50 sensor, but if it’s going to be outside facing west in Las Vegas, it has to be this other kind. So we keep our arms around all of the biometric modalities and the strengths and weaknesses of the devices on the market.” The company offers both one-to-one and one-to-many matching and its software may be housed on a client’s own server or by a cloud service.

Among its applications, SecurLinx has installed face recognition for the police department of Jersey City, New Jersey. “So if they have a person who comes in with no ID and they’ve committed a crime or just need help, you can start to identify them by running a picture through the mugshot database,” Hodge says. “And we closed the deal to extend that system into Paterson, New Jersey, which is neighboring and shares a lot of ‘customers.’”

The company is also working with those small to medium-sized national governments on systems to manage elections, for JASON HODGE example, or to identify Vice President SecurLinx Integration Software citizens. “With a biometric

ISTOCK

“Our job in helping customers get to a solution to an identity management problem is knowing all the devices.”

national ID card, you can do all kinds of interesting things—like, companies can use your card as your ID badge at work,” Hodge says.

“There’s a lot of global opportunity for this, and we’re having some success in the Middle East, North Africa, and West Africa.”

SecurLinx co-founder, President, and CEO Barry Hodge, father of the vice president, moved his company from Alabama in 2004 to take advantage of the emerging biometrics industry in West Virginia. A decade after the move, SecurLinx is finally seeing the dawn of the commercial biometrics market it initially aimed to serve. “We’ve put face recognition in two separate, related hospitals,” Jason Hodge explains. The Atlantic Health System hospitals in northern New Jersey needed to manage several populations. “One was drug seekers at the emergency rooms,” he says. “They’ll go to different outlets until they get the narcotics they’re dependent on. With this system, if a hospital turns someone away, they can upload the camera footage and alert related hospitals that that person may be on their way.” Relatives who cause problems over patient care is another population, along with unmarried parents of children who have a stake in the delivery in the maternity ward but no legal standing, and terminated employees who are no longer welcome at the facilities.

SecurLinx is devoting particular attention now to its health care applications. “There’s not an identity management problem that health care delivery systems don’t have,” Hodge says, both for regulating access and for secure identification of patients.

“These technologies do save you money,” Hodge says of the value proposition for the commercial sector. “You can really tighten up insurance costs or reduce shrinkage and lossage.” The company employs about 15 and is building a professional, geographically distributed health care sales force.

Established in 2003 Headquartered in Morgantown securlinx.com

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Taking Biometrics Global Northrop Grumman seeks to establish a global biometric center of excellence in Fairmont.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

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n the mid-2000s, when the U.S. Department of Defense wanted to take its ABIS fingerprint repository to the next level, it turned to Northrop Grumman. The longtime defense contractor’s DOD Automated Biometric Identification System broke new ground when it went online in 2009. Today Northrop is updating DOD ABIS—and also looking to apply its expertise globally.

DOD ABIS expanded the department’s existing system of “tenprint” fingerprint sets into the U.S. government’s first “multimodal” biometric system—that is, one that uses more than one biometric parameter for identification. “If I have your fingerprint, I’m fairly certain you are who you say you are,” says Gus Pilarte, Northrop Grumman’s Deputy Program Manager for ABIS, of the value of a multimodal system. “But if I’ve got your fingerprint, your iris, and your face, I’m a lot more certain. When you start combining things, you have a much higher level of certainty. That’s the beauty of multimodal identification.”

DOD ABIS does a complex set of things fast. When, say, a foreign national presents at a U.S. military base in a conflict zone, the guard at the checkpoint needs to make a quick “friend or foe” determination. He collects biometric impressions—any or all of fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, and face photographs—and sends them by satellite to Clarksburg for identification. There, DOD ABIS unpacks the multiple biometric impressions and submits them to a search engine that scans a repository that amounted, in summer 2014, to 12 million records on 7 million individual identities.

“It’ll look through and make one of three determinations,” Pilarte says. “‘Yes, we have a match, and here’s what we know about that person;’ ‘No, we don’t have this ID here so tell us as much as

Formed in 1994 Northrop purchase of Grumman Headquartered in Falls Church, VA northropgrumman.com

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“The West Virginia University program in biometrics is one of the best in the nation, so we don’t have to go very far to find resources that understand this field and support it.”

you can so we can create this dossier;’ or, ‘The computer can’t tell for sure.’

This last category is sent to Biometrics Examination Services, where certified biometrics examiners review the information on large GUS PILARTE Deputy Program Manager screens and compare Northrop Grumman records to make the determination manually.” Then it puts the package back together and sends a response out to the field.

How long does all that take? For all but about 10 percent that go to manual processing, “it’s measured in seconds,” Pilarte says. The certainty offered by multiple modalities and the speed of Northrop’s system give the 21st-century U.S. warfighter valuable decisionmaking capacity.

Northrop opened an office in Fairmont in 2006 to support its work for the DOD. The company currently employs about 70 in Fairmont, including systems engineers, software developers, documentation specialists, and trainers. Most were hired locally and about half received their academic training in West Virginia. “That is one thing Northrop Grumman believes in,” Pilarte says. “The West Virginia University program in biometrics is one of the tops in the nation, so we don’t have to go very far to find resources that understand this field and support it. They’re graduating very talented developers and very good biometrics engineers—we don’t have to go looking somewhere else for people.”

The company also subcontracts to local companies for specialized services: New-Bold Enterprises, a small, disadvantaged, womanowned business in Fairmont, for example, and MPL Corporation, a small, woman-owned business based in Buckhannon. “Because of the large biometrics community here, some of the small local companies have very specialized, skilled resources that we would have a hard time finding elsewhere,” Pilarte says.

Northrop is now upgrading DOD ABIS to integrate the system more closely with the FBI’s Next Generation Identification and other government biometric data repositories, and to make response times even faster. And it’s grooming its Fairmont location as its own global biometric center of excellence. “We’re looking to establish a system very similar to ABIS for U.S. allies and we’re pursuing additional opportunities, both defense and civil,” Pilarte says. “All of the development, engineering, and architecture for that would come out of Fairmont.”

Mining Images for Intelligence Tygart Technology’s MXSERVER turns vast quantities of facial images in both photographs and videos into organized digital media repositories.

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WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

ideo surveillance sounds good in theory—at the entrance to an airport, say, to identify known and suspected terrorists before they can board a plane. But how does that nonstop wave of data get analyzed? Enter Tygart Technology. “Our MXSERVER solution automatically analyzes videos and photographs and extracts facial images, and matches them against faces that are contained in a watch list,” says Tygart President John Waugaman.

MXSERVER, short for Media Exploitation Server, started out almost a decade ago as MatchBox: an intelligence agency-focused laptop product that helped analysts in the field manage and search their video and photograph collections. It was a multimodal biometric capability, Waugaman says—fingerprint, voice, and face—but aimed primarily at indexing photographs and videos and managing the identities across entire digital media repositories.

“So it’s not just about identifying a person but also, ‘Where else have I seen this person in my video and photo collection?’” he says.

Based on the product’s success on laptops in the field, the agencies got more ambitious. They asked Tygart to scale the utility up to a web-based solution that could manage a larger, centrally accessible volume of material. “So MatchBox morphed into MXSERVER, a cloudbased application that can handle massive video and photo collections—more for the headquarters type of analyst here in the States. And that’s our focus now.”

JOHN WAUGAMAN President, Tygart Technology The primary application of MXSERVER is for national security and law enforcement organizations to search the photos and videos from seized computers and cell phones. “Instead of human beings sitting down and watching or viewing this content, you can load it into MXSERVER and search it for faces that might be of interest,” Waugaman says. “‘Does this person appear anywhere in this collection of computer hard drives, cell phones, SIM cards?’ And you can connect the dots: ‘Why is this person appearing across multiple drives?’ That’s the kind of

SHUTTERSTOCK

“Instead of human beings sitting down and watching or viewing this content, you can load it into MXSERVER and search it for faces that might be of interest.”

question MXSERVER is answering for our customer base.” And it’s fast: It processes hours of digital video in minutes.

Beyond the federal intelligence agencies that supported the original work, MXSERVER is used by others in security and law enforcement—for example, the West Virginia Intelligence Fusion Center, one of the national network of cross-entity data-sharing organizations initiated by the federal government in the mid-2000s.

And it’s gone international, in Basra, Iraq. “MXSERVER is being deployed as part of a network of 400 surveillance cameras operated by the Basra police department and funded by oil companies to protect critical infrastructure,” Waugaman says. “As cars go through checkpoints, cameras are focused on the driver and passenger sides, extracting faces and bouncing them off a watch list. If there’s a match it’s conveyed to guards at the next checkpoint. So this is more of a real-time monitoring application.”

Started in 1992, Tygart Technology now employs about 25, with commercial product development staff at the Fairmont headquarters and others in Washington, D.C. It’s among a growing number of West Virginia-made companies that have made the leap to prime contracting. “It is a different marketing model—you have to market directly to the government as opposed to marketing to the large integrators,” Waugaman acknowledges. Some internal pieces need to be in place, too. “You have to establish financial systems that will pass muster with the federal government and, depending what agency you’re going to work with, you may need to go through the clearance process for your company, not just as individuals.” His advice for making the leap to prime: Persevere. “This is a long game— the sale cycle on the federal opportunities is 12 months minimum, more like two years. But it’s a necessity if you want to grow beyond a 10-, 20-person company. It’s good to control your own destiny.”

Established in 1992 Headquartered in Fairmont tygart.com

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USING THE DIGITAL WORLD FOR GOOD

There’s no one word that can characterize the extent to which digital information is both protected and discovered. Traditionally the word “cybersecurity” evokes an image of defense, keeping malicious users from accessing or tampering with sensitive data. Today our need to protect critical information and to investigate criminal behavior has evolved far beyond the concept of cybersecurity when the word was first coined.

“The more things people do on the Internet, the more important cybersecurity becomes— banking, filing taxes, and that’s just the financial world,” says West Virginia University researcher Katerina Goseva-Popstojanova. “There are personal things with Facebook and Twitter. Then there’s political infrastructure with the Smart Grid, power distribution, and water supply.”

It’s all computer controlled. Security threats are not just financial, they affect the critical infrastructure of the country. “Terrorism—it’s not science fiction. It’s a thing that can happen,” she says. But as information technology has progressed, and crime with it, the clues for discovering potential or real criminal behavior have gone digital, too. Field professionals within law enforcement and intelligence are now advancing their investigative understanding and access to digital criminal behavior, in addition to more traditional digital fence building, and they’re doing it right here in West Virginia.

CYBERSECURITY

Solving Digital Crimes, One Course at a Time The National White Collar Crime Center in Fairmont is training digital crime solvers nationwide.

WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATIE GRIFFITH

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registered sex offender makes off with a 13-year-old girl he contacted via social media. He drives her from Arkansas to Texas before authorities are alerted. But based on the abductor’s cell phone signal, the two are tracked to a small town and found near the home of his family. “If you’ve read any reports of a person being arrested because of things found on their computer or phone, it’s likely we taught the cops how to do the digital investigations,” says Scott Pancoast, an instructor with the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) in Fairmont.

From phone records to social media searches to hard drive imaging, the NW3C provides law enforcement agencies nationwide with the instruction and tools for investigating modern criminal activity.

“You don’t see any criminal activity these days that doesn’t have a computer element to it,” says Jim Foley, manager of curriculum development at NW3C. “Either social media or cell phones, there’s evidence or indicators in the cyber world for all types of crimes.” To forge a check 100 years ago, a criminal needed a pretty good artist, a signature forger, and someone with an upper lip stiff enough to brave the bank guards. Just 10 years ago he might still need a talented forger, but printing the fake check was possible with a computer. Today you don’t need to print the check. You don’t even need to take the check into the bank. “My local bank has a phone app to let me automatically deposit a check. The bank never sees it. So where will law enforcement go to find the forged checks? That phone,” Pancoast says. “Whether you sign someone’s name, or submit a bogus check, or maybe you’ve just altered some numbers, it would be on the phone. Crimes are moving from the brick and mortar world to the digital world. And that brings all sorts of problems.”

While technology has in many ways made it easier to commit crimes, it’s also made it easier to solve them—with the right training.

NW3C’s mission is to instruct state and local law enforcement in how to investigate and prosecute these kinds of crimes. “Our goal is to keep the state and local investigators up to speed to keep up with the criminals,” Foley says. To do that investigators have to get ongoing updates on the computer crime world, different types of frauds, and technologies to detect them. At the Fairmont center, law enforcement personnel with years of criminal investigative experience sit with technology experts, lawyers, and educators to create training programs for federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement. It’s not interrogation techniques or best practices for fingerprint dusting—it’s everything digital.

Funded primarily by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the organization teaches nearly 200 classes per year to agencies from Rockville, Maryland, to Florida, to Hawaii. “We provide that training at no charge to the officer or the agency,” says Robert Matheny, an NW3C supervisor of curriculum development. A police chief himself, Matheny says he wishes he had made use of the NW3C during his time patrolling the streets. “The cell phone recovery and the computer recovery courses are things that a patrol officer out in the field can do, and I wish I had taken advantage of that training on many cases, whether it be a homicide or a series of break-ins,” he says. “These are the things that would have helped me do my job a lot better when I was out investigating.”

Courses range from securing law enforcement networks to imaging hard drives, and all are geared to suit individual agency needs and available technology. Pancoast recently developed a course on retrieving images and data, even deleted data, from Android

“You don’t see any criminal activity these days that doesn’t have a computer element to it. Either social media or cell phones, there’s evidence or indicators in the cyber world for all types of crimes.”

devices. “A lot of research and investigative tools are looking at phones and tablets.

The major use for phones is texting, not calling,” he says.

Pictures, text messages, web history, calendars—all of that is resdiscoverable even if it’s been deleted from a phone. The potential for discovery using phone records and deleted evidence is so significant to the prosecution of criminal cases that it has required judicial intervention. A federal judge recently ruled that law JIM FOLEY enforcement needs a warrant to Manager of Curriculum Development National White Collar Crime Center search a cell phone, even after a person has been arrested.

“Phones used to be innocuous and now they’re your life,” Pancoast says. But getting information from the phones is still problematic.

“With some Androids you have to break into the phone and connect it up with electrodes to pull the data off. It’s tough to do. It’s high-end stuff that needs specialized software.”

In the computer crimes division alone, 20 instructors travel throughout the country with trunks of computers and equipment that make up course labs to educate investigative agencies. “We train them on how to do a forensic on a hard drive, on a desktop, a laptop, or even cell phones,” says Tom Macauley, manager of the NW3C’s computer crimes division. “We’re looking at how a computer stores information and how a detective can view a hard drive in order to extract that information for evidential purposes.” It’s not just a matter of hacking into a computer using a search warrant and grabbing the files to a portable drive. Prosecutors need to show juries and judges that the information was pulled from a hard drive in a legal, sound way and that by taking the information the investigators haven’t left any digital DNA of their own that could corrupt a case. “When you do a forensic investigation of a computer, you want to image the hard drive—it’s an exact duplicate of the hard drive,” Macauley says. To image a drive without writing to it, investigators need to use write blockers.

Some of these tools are free on the Internet, others have been developed by software companies, and still others were developed in-house by NW3C. “One we developed is called TUX—a software write blocker,” Macauley says. “You can go into someone’s house using a thumb drive and boot up the computer in TUX. It allows you to view the hard drive without writing to the hard drive.” If an investigator finds anything incriminating, unusual files or any child pornography, for example, he can take the hard drive back to a lab for a complete analysis. Back at the lab investigators need to make that image, the exact replica of the hard drive, to work on without damaging the original. “We put the original away into evidence.

Then you can sit for hours and view what’s on the hard drive.” In addition to the tools developed in-house, Macauley and his team train investigators on tools developed by companies such as EnCase, FTK, and iLook. NW3C has also recently launched a new learning management system online and an officer can sit at a computer anywhere in the country and take these courses.

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Training the Experts

The NW3C provides training and support to some of the most specialized law enforcement units in operation. The ICAC—Internet Crimes Against Children—task force, for example, is a major player using NW3C’s resources. With at least one unit in each state, ICAC helps state and local law enforcement respond to cyber enticement, child pornography, and related crimes by providing training, victim services, community education, and forensic and investigative assistance. “We coordinate with ICAC and provide training on not just computer forensics, but real-time investigation of cybercrimes.

We actually show them how to view things on websites or social media,” Macauley says.

The Regional Computer Forensic Laboratories (RCFL) run by the FBI are also partnered with and trained by NW3C. The RCFL comprises 16 units throughout the country—Orange County, California, to Philadelphia and New York—that aid law enforcement in obtaining digital evidence of crimes spanning terrorism, child pornography, and trade secret theft. Macauley and his team do both training and technical support. “We have had incidents where we’ve worked with agencies to locate a missing child through phone records. We can look at someone’s phone and put that information into a software to map someone’s location,” he says. “In Texas they located a woman’s body because they followed her phone records.”

In that case, two Texas rangers who had just come back from an NW3C class where they learned location techniques and were able to team up with the local law enforcement and experts at NW3C. “You can do this location work manually but it would take months,” 52

The NW3C creates hundreds of mobile labs each year to train law enforcement personnel across the country on digital investigation techniques.

Macauley says. “These programs allow you to do it in minutes. As long as you have your phone on, you can be located.”

An Ongoing Effort

As criminals receive word of the latest in criminal tracking methods, they reorient their methods, making NW3C’s work an ongoing process. The organization hires experts in multiple fields—entry level to bachelor’s degrees and higher—to stay one step ahead of criminal organizations.

“We have computer crimes specialists, curriculum developers, researchers, communications experts, an IT department, administrative personnel—there’s just a gamut,” says Cassandra Hearns, a human resources specialist at NW3C. Some staff come from a range of related careers. Macauley, of the computer crimes division, worked similar assignments as a sergeant in charge of a cybercrime unit in New Jersey, for example, and curriculum developer Foley took the opportunity to leave instructional design and training in Washington, D.C., to move back home.

And some are hired locally, Hearns says. “We tend to recruit with the local colleges and universities like Fairmont State and West Virginia University. Usually they’re studying criminal justice, computer sciences, forensics, writing, or have just graduated from the law school. The forensics programs are very good at WVU.” ID

Unveiling Crime SARC provides tools for law enforcement to uncover digital theft.

WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

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t’s the invisible ink of the digital world, but the concept of steganography—hiding messages within another thing or message—is an old one. Years ago messages were hidden by tattooing them onto a person’s head and letting the hair grow out over the words, or by knitting Morse code into a sweater to be unraveled and decoded upon delivery. Now it refers to a way of digitally hiding information within a file, invisible to discovery unless someone has the specialized tools to reveal that information.

“Today if someone wanted to steal sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, or intellectual property from their job, it could be sent out of a company in such a way that the security staff only sees a vacation photo,” says Chad Davis, director of the Steganography Analysis and Research Center in Fairmont.

Whether they’re stealing trade or national security secrets or distributing child pornography via the web, criminals are aided by data-hiding applications, some of which are commercial, but most of which are built by hobby programmers who put their software up on freeware websites. Davis and his team at the SARC offices in Fairmont research and develop what are called steganalysis tools to find information and extract what’s hidden. “Primarily our customers are government and law enforcement. We’ve sold in the U.S. to the FBI, the intelligence agencies, branches of the military, and various police departments across the country, and also in the private sector to large corporations like Bank of America,” he says.

But SARC isn’t just working on the domestic stage. “About 75 percent of our business is international. We’ve exported to over 35 countries globally with our tools,” Davis says, including the Metropolitan Police in London. “There are only two companies we know of doing this kind of analysis and creating these kinds of tools, including us.”

No one method is used to disguise information, and that investigative obstacle is often compounded by a layer of encryption.

People hiding information don’t even need to be technologically savvy. Plenty of those free steganography tools use drag-and-drop interfaces or text-entry boxes, meaning the amount of information circulating illegally is potentially endless. Social security numbers, credit card numbers, and intelligence community secrets can all be disguised with something as innocuous as a kitten photo or song lyric. An investigator with one of SARC’s customers recently discovered hidden information leading to an arrest. “On a computer system he found several images of trains. They were categorized by steam engines, coal cars, cabooses, things like that. It was odd because the suspect didn’t work for the railroads and wasn’t a hobbyist,” Davis says. Using a SARC tool investigators discovered those images concealed different categories of child abuse.

The Steganography Analysis and Research Center was born from a 2002 Dartmouth College needs assessment report pinpointing

“Today if someone wanted to steal sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, or intellectual property from their job, it could be sent out of a company in such a way that the security staff only sees a vacation photo.”

the lack in law enforcement of tools to find this hidden information. The applications used to hide information within a file were classified as an emerging technological CHAD DAVIS threat for cybercrime Director, Steganography Analysis and Research Center investigators. SARC’s parent company, information security and assurance firm Backbone Security, applied for a Department of Justice grant and launched SARC in 2004, and the demand for this work has only grown since.

“What we’re doing is so complex and involved, we could easily hire 50 people full time. There’s plenty of work for people to do,” Davis says. “There are thousands of applications out there doing the data hiding. To keep up with them means a phenomenal amount of work.”

In addition to SARC, Backbone runs DSD Laboratories of Bridgeport, an approving body for contracting companies looking to provide cloud services and information security for federal agencies.

“A cloud service provider would contract with DSD to inspect their product against a rigid set of security requirements, including those of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Federal Information Security Management Act,” says Chris McNemar, director of DSD’s Internet Security Division. “We also provide continuous monitoring of their product against security vulnerabilities.” These two branches of Backbone found a good home in West Virginia. “We sell a lot of technology in this area between Bridgeport, the FBI, NASA, and all the research going on in Morgantown,” McNemar says. “We found Fairmont to be well located between all the centers and Backbone was interested in colleges that are starting security programs, like Fairmont State and West Virginia University.”

Established in 2004 Located in Fairmont sarc-wv.com

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CYBERSECURITY

Training a Generation of Digital Experts Tomorrow’s cyber experts are being trained steps from the anchors, contractors, and investigators that make up West Virginia’s high-tech corridor.

WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH PHOTOGRAPHED BY ELIZABETH ROTH AND KATIE GRIFFITH

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could spend my life on an iPad, says one researcher at West Virginia University, and, in fact, many of us do. Every life necessity is available on one sleek, intuitive screen, and crime, too, has moved with us into the cyber world. Now our job is to keep up with 21st century villains with every twist of coding language we have at our disposal.

“What you need is not a big set of large computers. What you really need is a variety of different platforms and tools to experiment on,” says Brian Woerner, chair of the WVU Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Schools in West Virginia offer these experimental experiences by giving students the opportunity to defend, investigate, study, and play with a variety of cyber information challenges while conducting the cutting-edge research keeping our digital lives and information secure. From national security to state police resources, current and future digital expertise is here.

West Virginia University

WVU offers a comprehensive program incorporating education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as research that contributes to this ever changing field. Research spans software security testing and automatic machine learning, but one of the most hands-on experiences for students is a digital program supporting law enforcement and investigators nationwide.

It’s no secret that investigators are notoriously territorial. They’ll doggedly trail a case, protective of leads and evidence, until it’s solved or goes cold. WVU professors and graduate students are hoping to change that territorial-ness with a digital search system that combines jurisdictional data systems to assist in child crime investigations.

“It amounts to a pointer system that will allow any Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) unit nationwide to look at federal databases, state databases, and specific investigator databases,” says Roy Nutter, a professor in the Lane Department leading the WVU research group.

“If the system brings back a hit on a specific query, it gets those units talking to each other.”

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The West Virginia Cyber Crime Cooperative was established in 2002 between WVU, West Virginia State Police, and the National White Collar Crime Center.

That query system currently has more than 200 users from all 50 states, but it’s just one tool developed in conjunction with the West Virginia Cyber Crime Cooperative (WV3C). The cooperative was born in 2002, formed by WVU, state police, and the National White Collar Crime Center (page 50). The group has grown to a 4,000-square-foot facility just off of the WVU campus where Lane Department students assist law enforcement in developing the tools that will enable their investigations. The facility hosts the headquarters for the West Virginia State Police Digital Forensics Lab, the state police Child Protection Unit, and ICAC. “We’re side by side,” Nutter says. “We are the idea source to keep these groups of law enforcement up to date. Our research and our graduate students are writing tools to assist investigations.”

The WV3C is an important idea source to keep investigators on point, and students work hard to make sure they’re providing the best materials possible to state and national law enforcement. But all work and no play can make for a boring education, and WVU is nothing if not an exciting place to learn.

Think David and Goliath but, instead of Biblical characters, David is a group of WVU students defending a computer network. And Goliath is the National Security Agency. Each year a team of WVU students called CyberWVU competes in a number of cybersecurity competitions, including the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, where they defend a computer network from the

FIRST IN DIGITAL FORENSICS

RICK LEE

Marshall University in Huntington has the first and only master’s program accredited in digital forensics by the Forensic Science Education Programs Accreditation Commission. The school received its accreditation in 2012 and, in 2014, it’s still the only one (page 61).

offensive advances of field professionals. “This is all taking place in cyberspace, but it’s the students’ job to protect their network from different hazards and attacks,” Woerner says. “They’re in a big room with a curtain, and behind that curtain is a team of professionals from organizations like the National Security Agency whose job is to bring the student-run networks to their knees.” The competitions can last two to three days, with different phases of attack. In 2014 the WVU team placed first in its subregional competition and advanced to regionals at Johns Hopkins University.

CyberWVU, a team of nearly a dozen students, was founded in 2011 as a way to give students another hands-on form of learning. “We really focus on the idea of learning by doing,” says Jacob Wolen, a master’s student and vice president of the club. “You always learn about the theory, but you never know how to apply it, so this is really a good outlet to start testing theories and how they apply together. If you don’t know how to apply it, all you can do is sit there and draw pictures.”

After graduating from WVU and its security programs both serious and fun, students move on to systems analyst jobs for many different companies. “Students are getting jobs. They’re making good money. Some of our graduates are well over six figures just coming out of school,” Nutter says. One student, he explains, was presented a significant job offer following a CyberWVU competition.

He still had a year left in school.

When they do leave, students are not necessarily selling themselves as cybersecurity or digital forensics experts, but as people who know operating systems, software systems, and can develop and run things like large data centers. “In doing that, though, you need to be knowledgeable. Almost all of our graduates going out in this computer field to write software or create systems need to be able to defend those systems,” Nutter says. “It’s not some overt thing that you sit down ready to defend a system—you build defense in from the beginning and keep it there.”

Since 2008 the WVU Lane Department has been designated a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The honor recognizes the school for considerable contribution of information assurance research and for nurturing a new generation of cyber experts. And the field is booming.

WVU class enrollment has doubled in some areas, Woerner says.

Thirty-five faculty members and more than 600 undergraduate and graduate students are conducting nearly $6 million per year in research. Students involved with the program can apply for federal scholarships, while program faculty compete for specialized research projects. Departmental collaborations span a number of organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and NASA. 55

CYBERSECURITY

HONEYPOTS

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Fairmont State University houses the OSIX program, where students develop a number of intelligence projects for national and local organizations.

Fairmont State University

While WVU is primarily engaged in defense, just down the road at Fairmont State University students are creating intelligence documents used by high-level organizations like the CIA and FBI to bring down potential threats to national security.

As part of FSU’s Open Source Intelligence Exchange, or OSIX, students are busily combing through open source media like Twitter, online discussion boards, and blogs to create intelligence reports for organizations as high as the U.S. State Department. The program is housed within FSU’s National Security and Intelligence program.

“We take a select group of students from the NSI program and related disciplines, our star performers, and put them in an environment where they can take what they’re learning in the classroom about intelligence research and analysis and put it into practice,” says OSIX Director David Abruzzino. Students use tools and free aggregators to scour social media accounts looking for information from individuals, local papers, local businesses, and other sources closer to an area of interest than might typically be found in mainstream reports. “They are using social media to gather actionable intelligence about criminal organizations and extremist groups,” Abruzzino says.

The OSIX team is divided into two major areas of focus, one looking at political developments in the Middle East and North Africa, and another looking at more local public safety issues. “We have a close working relationship with the West Virginia Intelligence Fusion Center in Charleston, and through them we serve a variety of customers throughout law enforcement and public safety,” Abruzzino says. Those working on the political arena produce regular reports highlighting political and security developments in the Middle East to send to organizations including the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, academia, and think tanks. ID

NIKKI BOWMAN

In reality they’re sensors—and they’re an experiment in behavior analysis for the malicious ways people and programs attack networks. Katerina GosevaPopstojanova, an award-winning researcher and professor at WVU, has set up a system of computers in such a way that they attract attackers like flies to what looks like easy honey. The attackers are left to their malevolent aims, but are being tracked and analyzed all the while.

Goseva-Popstojanova studies attacker behaviors engaged in a variety of activities depending on what she has set up the machines to do. “They try to break passwords. We also had machines running blogs and wikis in which we had a lot of spam,” she says. Unsolicited spam messages used to be sent primarily through email, but these days are used in Web 2.0 applications including Facebook, blogs, and wikis. “We are studying those messages and what tactics they use to trick people,” she says.

The setup doesn’t threaten WVU’s own networks, and the honeypots don’t see regular users. They are headless machines, without screens, that exist solely to monitor malicious assaults. “The attackers who attack this system don’t know, because for all intents and purposes it’s a normal system,” Goseva-Popstojanova says.

“That helps us with the research because we don’t need to separate the attacks from normal computer activity, which would be like finding a needle in a haystack.”

The work is supported by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $500,000, and has employed six Lane Department graduate students.

By studying these behaviors, researchers and security professionals can keep up to speed on the evolution of cyber-attacks. “Attackers are clever,” Goseva-Popstojanova says. “If you make your system better, they’ll change their behavior to be harder to detect. Most of the attacks are by software programs, but they disguise their behaviors so you cannot easily find them.”

A Full Security Perspective KeyLogic assesses federal contract work from every angle—security to resiliency.

WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATIE GRIFFITH

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e can run executive meetings wirelessly from our homes. We can send millions of dollars from one coast to another in seconds. We can drink hot beverages while lounging in air-conditioned buildings as summer temperatures blister the blacktop outside.

We can run most all our errands, shopping to banking, from our cell phones. As advanced as we like to think ourselves, what happens if one of the major data centers allowing us to live this way comes under attack?

The concept is resiliency. We build the fences to keep malicious programs and people out of our systems, but should they still get in, those systems must be able to withstand the attack—lest melting iced lattes become the least of our problems. With arms stretching across the I-79 Technology Corridor and its federal anchors, KeyLogic is one contracting firm with an eye on full mission and system performance assurance. Founded in 1999 in Morgantown, KeyLogic has contracts across NASA, NETL, the FBI, and even the IRS, spanning information assurance, digital investigation, and system resiliency. “We’re not an IT company in that we don’t sell desktop computers,” says KeyLogic Program Director Glenn Copen. “We help our customers with mission execution. We’ve helped the IRS retrieve money it was owed, we assist NASA’s missions of sending up spacecraft, and we’ve built a budget system for the EPA.” KeyLogic is known for building high-end systems for government agencies, and the systems require strict conformance to federal security requirements. Whether it’s a fraud investigation tool for the IRS, a commercial credit card safeguarding tool, or a budgeting platform for the EPA, all the information used within these systems must be protected. Copen will point out that KeyLogic isn’t a cybersecurity firm, per se, but it takes all security aspects—prevention to detection to resiliency—into account within its contract work.

For the National Forest Service KeyLogic provides resiliency support, assuring that, should an attack occur, the service won’t fall to its knees. “Cybersecurity plays into that,” Copen says. “We conduct mock exercises and mock terrorism where we give them a scenario to respond to. Something like the bombing of one of their data centers.”

For the Department of Energy, KeyLogic does support work for Smart Grid, a power system that is critical to the day-to-day functioning of the United States and its citizens—bath-time to daily commutes. As our electricity supply moves from a system requiring workers in hard hats reading meters, to a network that relies on digital communication, we depend more heavily on digital technology for everything. We expect our power to be on, and if it

From the heart of Morgantown, KeyLogic provides full system assurance services to federal agencies around the country.

goes out we expect it to come back quickly. But what if it doesn’t? “We bring in expertise to test the security of these systems,” Copen says. “The next terror attack is going to be on technology. It affects everything— Smart Grid for power, your water supply, all these process-driven systems depend on technology.”

To do its work KeyLogic employs nearly 200 people from backgrounds in software development and system engineering to project management and performance analysis. “It’s a pretty broad range of people, but it lets us cover the range our clients need. We understand our clients’ whole perspective,” Copen says. And covering those needs allowed the company to grow quickly. KeyLogic claims that every one of its federal contracting customers returns for other projects. The company also employs researchers in Chantilly, Virginia, Columbia, Maryland, and on-site with various clients, though the organization still calls Morgantown home. “In the first years, all of our business was in D.C. We didn’t have any business in West Virginia. But as opportunities arose here in West Virginia we dropped back from the D.C. market,” Copen says. “John Hammock, our founder, wanted a West Virginiabased company.”

Established in 1999 Headquartered in Morgantown keylogic.com

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IDENTIFYING THE BAD GUYS

Whodunit? Experts in West Virginia are making that question easier to answer all the time.

Researchers are advancing the scientific methods that reconstruct events and link them with people. They’re engaging with the legal system and updating the skills of practitioners across the nation. And they’re training the next generation of forensic scientists.

“Just like John Q. Public, we’d like to be less fearful of crimes on the street, less fearful of terrorism, know that our kids are safe from online predators when they’re out there on the Internet,” says Marshall University Forensic Science Director Terry Fenger. “Every aspect of society is influenced in some way by all types of crime so we’re trying to address the current as well as the future needs of our citizens—essentially, we're fighting crime.”

The direction of research says law enforcement can look forward to faster scientific analysis and better, more accurate ways of connecting evidence with biometric repositories for identification. Fenger also hopes for a national certification of forensic analysts.

STEVE SHALUTA

Forensics in Service to the State Tight connections with the West Virginia State Police give Marshall University’s forensics program unmistakable relevance.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY

Marshall University forensics students learn to document evidence such as drugs, blood spatter, and tire tread impressions.

FORENSICS

I

f someone finds an unidentifiable human skeleton in the woods—no clothes, no belongings, not even any dental work—what happens next? If it’s in West Virginia, the medical examiner turns to the Marshall University Forensic Science Center (MUFSC) in Huntington. “We’ll test the DNA and compare it to possible relatives,” says Director Terry Fenger. “We’ll test any potential parent’s or sibling’s DNA and possibly make an identification of the remains.”

Long a critical resource to police forensics, the MUFSC has its roots in continuing education. Fenger, a longtime Marshall microbiologist, created a continuing ed program at Marshall for West Virginia State Police crime lab staff in the early 1990s. In the course of that work, he and WVSP forensic examiners recognized needs for both forensic laboratory services and an academic program. By 1995 Fenger saw the state’s criminal offender DNA registry lab established at Marshall along with creation of the university’s master’s program in forensic sciences—among the first in the nation.

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In the two decades since, what became the MUFSC has provided invaluable forensic services to the West Virginia State Police. It’s also turned out hundreds of master’s-level graduates in forensic science trained on state-of-the-art equipment by current practitioners. And all along, it has dedicated its laboratories and expertise to service to the state and nation.

Working Laboratory: DNA

Refrigerators and freezers hum in the 10-by-20-foot evidence locker room at the center’s Forensic DNA Laboratory. The room is locked and it’s secure in every other way, too. “If you lift up these acoustic tiles, you can see there’s security wire mesh to the ceiling so someone can’t climb up above the door and gain access,” says Jason Chute, technical leader for the lab. “A special membrane on the roof prevents any leaks from coming down and destroying evidence.

And auxiliary units keep the room cool. It’s all part of our Forensic Quality Services accreditation.”

Marshall University Forensic Science Center lab examiners prepare samples for analysis, to generate DNA profiles.

ALEX WILSON

DNA samples begin at the evidence locker room at one end of the building and proceed in a straight line down the hall through a processing lab, a preparation lab, a PCR lab where DNA is replicated to meet the needed sample size, and the analysis lab where the DNA is profiled. Much of the process is conducted through state-of-the-art automation that minimizes human error.

The result is a case-solving “DNA fingerprint”: a list of numerical pairs of genetic markers on 16 distinct regions of the genome that, taken as a full set, comprise a very nearly unique profile. “Say the police submit a blood stain from a crime scene to our lab. When the police get a suspect, we run the DNA from the suspect and the blood stain through our instrumentation,” Chute says. “If it’s a 100 percent match, I’d tell the jury the chances of having the same profile is one in—usually it would hit like a quintillion—in a population of nonrelated individuals. The jury would then have to decide: Are they two different people, with that one-in-a-quintillion chance, or is it the same person?”

DNA lab staff conduct research as well—for example, several projects assessing the longer-term value of profiling DNA left behind at property crimes. “Is it worth spending up to $1,000 to profile a series of DNA samples when a $200 bike is stolen? The knee-jerk reaction is ‘No,’” Chute says. But when MUFSC scientists profiled DNA left behind at a sampling of property crimes in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Charleston, South Carolina, and Huntington abd agencies entered the results into CODIS, criminal behavior patterns were revealed. “For one thing, it shows recidivism, where someone starts with breaking and entering and later moves up to more serious crimes,” Chute says. Catching criminals at the stage of property crime could slow or stop that escalation.

Vials of blood drawn from convicted criminals await analysis here, part of the MUFSC’s original and core work as the state’s designated Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) laboratory. “If you’re convicted of a felony or some misdemeanors in West Virginia, your blood is drawn when you go to prison and they send that here,” Chute explains. The lab develops a DNA profile for entry into CODIS, which is linked along with other state databases to the FBI’s National DNA Index System (NDIS). “So if someone leaves DNA at a crime scene in Florida and they were a convicted offender in West Virginia at some point, that can be connected up through NDIS.” In its two decades, the MUFSC’s DNA lab has expanded beyond its original CODIS work into forensic casework. The testing that helps to identify human remains, for example, can illuminate other types of cases as well. It can indicate paternity in cases of rape and incest; connect suspects with blood, saliva, and other DNA evidence left behind at crime scenes; and of course rule out suspects and even exculpate the unjustly convicted.

IMPROVING THE NATION’S FORENSICS Over the past decade and longer, the National Institute of Justice has supported the Marshall University Forensic Science Center in providing DNA analysis, Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, crime scene investigation, and other in-depth training to more than 2,500 forensic law enforcement professionals and nurses nationwide.

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FORENSICS

Working Laboratory: Digital Forensics

In an adjacent MUFSC facility, the West Virginia State Police conducts digital forensics for the state’s southern counties, and regionally and federally on consultation, with a particular focus on the extraction of evidence from personal electronic devices. “If it holds ones and zeros there’s a good chance we can recover it,” says Corporal Robert Boggs, analyst in charge of the Digital Forensic Unit.

Multiple times a day, police deliver laptop computers, cell phones, thumb drives, and other devices seized for casework to a 20-by20-foot room lined with every type of cable and with specialized forensic computer decks that can read any kind of data drive.

Extracting evidence from incoming devices is an ever-expanding job.

“A lot of households these days have three, four, five computers plus their mobile devices, and the hard drives can be very, very large.”

Boggs says. “Fortunately we have some pretty powerful machines that can parse through that quickly and efficiently.” Offsetting 64

that difficulty is a general lack of electronic guile on the parts of criminals. “Everybody’s taking pictures of their dope and their guns and posing with it,” he says, shaking his head.

The lab uncovers the evidence of drug deals and murders, Boggs says, but perhaps half of the work involves the abuse of children.

These cases carry special urgency because children may be suffering repeated and continuing attacks. Boggs recounts one case in which a laptop was returned to a Rent-A-Center with child pornography on its hard drive. Investigators identified two suspects and, on seizing and analyzing their cell phones, detailed ongoing abuse and stopped the perpetrators, removing the children from harm.

The value of digital evidence is clear. Out of thousands of cases the lab has contributed to over the past decade, Boggs says, only one was lost. “Most of the time the evidence is so incriminating, the case doesn’t even make it to trial,” he says.

ALEX WILSON

An intern assists Corporal Robert Boggs in extracting digital evidence from a seized computer at a West Virginia State Police Digital Forensics Unit at the MUFSC.

Academic Excellence

Given this context, students of the forensic science master’s degree program at the MUFSC benefit from the latest laboratory equipment and practice. Training facilities include DNA and digital forensics laboratories that mirror the working labs, a separate forensic chemistry lab, and a dedicated crime scene house.

The academic program is both scientifically rigorous and grounded in the legal system. “Our graduates will have to testify in court; they have to know chain of custody,” Fenger says. Students present evidence at mock trials and learn about the interplay between technology and law. “When a cell phone is part of a crime scene, can a law enforcement officer just start going through the data?” Fenger asks by way of example. “What if there are exigent circumstances—say, a child has been abducted? Can law enforcement then go into the cell phone to find information that will save that child? Current questions like these are embedded in what we do here.” Students also complete research internships in the summer between their two academic years, most at crime labs nationally and internationally.

Even today, only 20 programs offering master’s degrees in forensics in North America are accredited by the Forensic Science Education Programs Accreditation Commission. Marshall maintains its early primacy, becoming in 2012 the first with a program accredited in digital forensics and still, in 2014, the only one.

MUFSC students take top spots every year in American Board of Criminalistics exams—contributing to a reputation that draws 90 percent of the program’s students from beyond West Virginia’s borders—and 97 percent of graduates have jobs within a year.

To meet future needs, Fenger wants to grow the program beyond the 20 students it graduates each year. “Every day we see something hacked and other types of computer crimes perpetrated. Someone has to investigate that,” Fenger says. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano spoke at a homeland security summit at Marshall in 2011. “She announced that she could put 10,000 individuals in digital forensics and cybersecurity to work,” he says.

“That’s the need at the national level. I think digital forensics is going to explode.” ID

When a sexual assault victim is examined, the forensic professional collects evidence into a “rape kit” for later analysis. The Marshall University Forensic Science Center plays a role nationally in advancing the proper and timely management of this important evidence.

Jurisdictions across the nation have backlogs of thousands of rape kits that haven’t been analyzed, for example—some 400,000 nationally. The MUFSC has helped Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Detroit by profiling DNA in tens of thousands of accumulated kits.

“We get the data into the national criminal DNA database to help develop leads for these cases,” says Jason Chute, technical leader of the MUFSC DNA laboratory.

Some victims don’t choose immediately to press charges. In West Virginia, dozens of such kits each year used to languish on hospital shelves under unregulated storage conditions, the clean chain of evidence broken. Since 2008, the MUFSC stores those kits in its evidence locker room in case victims change their minds about legal action. “Most states don’t have an option like this—in most states, they’re still sitting in the hospitals,” Chute says. “But we’re starting to see legislation at the state levels addressing this issue.”

Improper collection of evidence into a rape kit can both further traumatize victims and break a case. Here, too, the MUFSC applies its expertise by offering Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, or SANE, training to more than 400 nurses nationwide over the past decade.

Trainees learn how to recognize, collect, and preserve evidence, interview victims, and refer them to community resources for follow-up.

The center has received state and national awards for its work in these areas.

STEVE SHALUTA

Students collect shoe impressions in dust at a mock crime scene staged at the MUFSC crime scene house.

RAISING THE STANDARDS FOR RAPE KITS

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Props for mock crime scenes include shovels and bones.

Where Crime Scene Investigators are Made With longstanding and prominent positions in professional and research forensics, West Virginia University’s forensics faculty are go-to resources for everything from standards-setting to continuing education for crime labs across the nation.

WRITTEN BY PAM KASEY PHOTOGRAPHED BY ELIZABETH ROTH

FORENSICS

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nside the creaky screen door of a modest 1950s brick house, chaos: Liquids from overturned glasses lie sticky on the kitchen floor. Furniture tumbles in obvious disarray in the den. Blood has dripped and coagulated on the wall of the wooden staircase and, in the master bedroom upstairs, a body sprawls across a blood-soaked bedspread. Several people stand peering at the body, notebooks in hand. This is not the horror it appears to be—it’s a class in crime scene investigation at West Virginia University’s crime scene training complex.

In the fast-advancing technical discipline of forensic science, graduates have to come out of the gate running. WVU gives them that advantage. “Our faculty are practicing in the field and they’re developing the technologies of the future,” says Gerald Lang, chairman of WVU’s Department of Forensic and Investigative Science (FIS). “And our facilities are state-of-the-art. That translates to cutting-edge educational programs.”

Student Allyce McWhorter cuts a swatch from a blood-stained pillowcase for DNA analysis. She came from Maryland specifically for WVU’s forensics program.

Game-changing Research

Better hair analysis could transform the field of forensics. WVU is leading the way. “Currently hair microscopists look at the appearance: the width, length, color, damage,” says Ming Hsieh Distinguished Professor Glen Jackson. His lab looks deeper. Enjoying the only North American installation of a very powerful mass spectrometer, Jackson and his students can get a general idea of what part of the world a person has been living in based on the specific ratio of lighter to heavier carbon isotopes. “We can also determine a person’s body mass index, age, and dietary things like how much meat and dairy they eat,” he enthuses. “Not only that but the hair stores a chronological record—and this is behavior, not just DNA. If it’s left behind at a crime scene, that information is stored there for all time. It could provide an investigative lead: ‘We’re looking for someone who’s severely obese’ or ‘someone over the age of 45.’”

Another of Jackson’s research projects may make even smeared latent fingerprints useful for crime solving. His lab is developing a practical method of analyzing the unique profiles of lipids in the residue that makes up a fingerprint. Real application may be 15 years away, “but the whole goal is to show what’s possible,” he says. “If we can get other people excited about it, the manufacturers can make it commercially.”

The carbon composition of maggots may soon help determine time of death, based on work in progress in the department. Fibers dropped from wigs used by criminals may soon provide usable clues. And research into tears, nicks, and other wear damage on shoe outsoles will determine how surely investigators can link crime scene footwear impressions with single suspects. Still other research has applicability beyond crime-solving: measuring the permeation of the toxic byproducts of methamphetamine production into the walls and other surfaces of a home, for example, to establish what type of remediation is necessary before it may be safely reinhabited.

“Most forensic science programs are focused on undergraduate education and very few of them have a core faculty that are really pushing the boundaries of the science,” Jackson says. “We have faculty who serve on national commissions, communicating one-onone with leaders in National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation as well as the FBI and major funding agencies, so we’re very much pushing the front lines of the discipline. That really helps us put the education in context when we talk to our students. We know where the future’s going.”

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Grounded in Practice

All of the department’s 11 permanent faculty conduct research. But education at FIS is also informed deeply by the practice of forensic investigation: Six faculty have more than a half-century of crime lab experience between them, and four adjuncts are working in the field now, at the FBI or in the court system.

An emphasis on student proficiency with instrumentation is one way practice shapes coursework. “A shortcoming in crime labs is, people cannot do troubleshooting and constantly need to bug somebody else to fix their equipment. Part of our training is for them to know the instrument before focusing on the evidence,” says Casper Venter, director of forensic facilities and a 22-year crime lab veteran. “Typically in an exam we will change settings on all the microscopes, and say, ‘Here you go. You first have to do troubleshooting before you can identify your samples.’”

Students are expected to know how to improvise. “What are your alternatives? How else can you get a result?” Venter says, mentioning, for example, the use of a common oven-bake bag to create a sealed environment for isolating accelerants in arson investigations. “I force the students not to always just use the newest technology and equipment but take them back to old-school as well.” They’re also

A student uses a comparison microscope. If the markings on two bullets match on a split screen, they were likely fired from the same gun.

taught to be discerning at the crime scene, because everything an examiner sends back to the lab will have to be analyzed. “Someone might come in and say, ‘We can do a virtual 360 of the crime scene and you can take that all back to the lab,’” Venter says. “But if it’s a highvolume crime lab, there’s no time to analyze all that.”

State-of-the-Art Facilities

FIS occupies three recently renovated floors in historic Oglebay Hall on WVU’s downtown campus, 18,000 square feet of prep, instrumentation, and classroom space. Gifts from California entrepreneur Ming Hsieh and his biometric company, Cogent Inc. (now part of 3M), created two named professorships and also a stateof-the-art identification laboratory. “His gifts have led to a strong foundation in our faculty and in the technology for our students,” Lang says.

Forensics is a technology-intensive enterprise, and FIS students build their skills using the latest technologies. They get handson experience with equipment that multiplies DNA and carries out genetic analysis. They conduct chemical analysis on gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers, and non-destructive sample analysis on a Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy; they compare inks and watermarks on a video spectral comparator. Separate laboratories house each of these and many other functions. “The

equipment here is WVU's Forensic & Investigative second to none,” says Science Outreach provides onsite and senior Joshua Davis, online training and continuing education who came to WVU to public forensic service providers. specifically for the fsi.research.wvu.edu forensics program and is pursuing a double major in chemistry and forensic chemistry. “It’s better than other schools I visited, and other students here say the same thing. It’s better than a lot of actual crime labs.”

In the fingerprint and firearms lab, students learn the wide range of techniques for lifting fingerprints. “We’ve got household glasses here, plates, tins, plastic bottles, and we’ll send students out to bring in any type of object they can think of to lift prints from,” Venter says. “You’ve got one shot at it so you need to employ the right method. Students practice using black powder, magnetic powders, fluorescent powders you can use with alternative light sources, ninhydrin, which gives a nice pink color, and also the superglue methods that work on some difficult fingerprints.”

The 24 stations in the computer laboratory are outfitted with two important systems. One is a 1.8 million-fingerprint dataset from the FBI, stripped of names for student use. “We load fingerprints from 69

FORENSICS

WVU’S FORENSIC AND INVESTIGATIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM WVU is one of just six institutions nationwide accredited for both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science degree in forensics. It’s the only one with three accredited undergraduate tracks: forensic biology, forensic chemistry and toxicology, and forensic examiner—a diversity of opportunity that allows students to find their own best fits.

Students come from across the U.S. and internationally. Undergraduates can declare the major only after completing two years of science and math requirements. Every student undergoes a rigorous summer internship at such locations as the United States Secret Service and forensic laboratories across the nation and internationally. The department turns out about 50 undergraduates and six graduate students a year. Most are hired to work in crime labs or in crime scene units; some go on to further academic studies and continue on to pathology or the pharmaceutical industry.

Research into wear damage on shoe soles will help investigators who find footprints at crime scenes.

our faculty and graduate students onto that,” Venter says. “Then we’re able to leave our fingerprints in the fingerprint lab or crime houses for students to collect, scan into the system, and see if they can find them in the database.” The other is the Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS) used by law enforcement across the U.S. to track ballistics information on guns used in crimes. That system is also part of an extensive research project under way at FIS: comparison from the first shot to the last of 1,000 rounds shot from each of 25 new firearms.

And, back to those crime houses. “The idea was to use a home to create a crime scene that was realistic for students to work in,” Lang says. FIS has a complex of four residential buildings. In the two fully furnished for staged crime scenes, students spend two semesters collecting and preserving evidence. Sometimes it’s single items, such as a fingerprint or a spiked drink. But they also process successively more complex crime scenes ranging from a burglary, where they take casts to identify the tool that jimmied the door, up to multiple murders with blood spatter, controlled substances, and maybe a vindictive comment written on the wall in blood—Venter draws liberally from his own long crime scene experience, and even that can provide clues. In 70

the garage, students process crimes involving vehicles. And they also get a full semester in the fourth building: the photography house. “In court, a picture tells a thousand words. But I’ve seen so many photos that are blurred or too dark,” Venter says. “We teach them how to use the right light sources, or what settings to use for a given lighting environment.” That course is taught by a 36-year veteran forensic photographer with the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service Crime Lab. Cameras are new, current-model Nikons every year. And again, the emphasis on familiarity with the equipment: No auto-focus.

Undergraduates in the forensic chemistry and biology tracks spend time at the crime houses alongside those in forensic examination so that, even though they’ll likely follow careers in crime labs, they’ll have a sense of the kinds of environments their samples might be coming from.

Ultimately this combination—state-of-the-art facilities and faculty conducting industry-driven research and working in the field— creates quality graduates and a local workforce that stands out. “This is what gives the students the kind of education they need to be abreast of the field at the time they graduate,” Lang says. “It’s really a commitment on our part.” ID

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LIFE IN IDINTEL RIDGE

Vibrant professional organizations, trailblazing research, and federal agency support are not, if we’re honest, the reasons generations of West Virginians have proudly called this state home. While vital to our livelihoods, it’s the unsurpassed outdoor recreation opportunities, the history, and the culture that make people visit once and fall in love.

It’s the breathing room with spots of bustling cultural activity, hubs of educational opportunity, and wide open business prospects that makes West Virginia unique. Where else can you open an industry conference on a paddleboard in a mountain lake? Or run from your Friday afternoon college class on digital investigation techniques to an autumn festival bonfire? In North Central West Virginia you can entertain clients with fine dining and views of ancient rivers on a rooftop restaurant overlooking a historic downtown. Then go catch a Broadway production up the road at the local land-grant university.

LIFESTYLE

Creative Learning Opportunities abound for students to make the most of their evenings and summers in North Central West Virginia.

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WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

orth Central West Virginia is known for having some of the best public school systems in the state. Students in Harrison, Marion, and Monongalia counties are supported by their communities with award-winning teachers, early access to higher education, advanced college-level classes, and the influence of respected universities right next door. As beneficial as these opportunities are, they aren’t the sole reason for student success. From private to statesponsored camps, classes, clubs, and organizations, the after-school opportunities for students along the I-79 corridor are, arguably, the best part of growing up in the region.

West Virginia Governor’s Schools

“There are a lot of things for kids around here,” says Ryan Claycomb, assistant dean of the West Virginia University Honors College in Morgantown and father of three. In addition to his duties at the WVU Honors College, Claycomb serves as dean of students for the state’s Governor’s School for Math and Science, where he oversees the yearly creation of a premier summer camp for the state’s most promising students. The Governor’s School for Math and Science is one of four Governor’s Schools in the state that select students from each county to participate in a period of pure educational enrichment. No grades, and no homework. Two of the four schools cover math and science, one is for the arts, and a fourth, the Governor’s Honors Academy, is for rising high school seniors and spans disciplines. “The schools rotate around the state, and they serve students from across the state—all are academically talented,” Claycomb says. “Frequently they’re the top kids in their schools.

They’re going to Stanford. They’re going to Yale. About half of the Bucklew scholarship students entering WVU this year were from Governor’s Honors Academy.”

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Students at the 2014 Governor’s School for the Arts work on still life drawings.

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COURTESY OF GSA

LIFESTYLE

Arts

WEST VIRGINIA WESLEYAN COLLEGE GIFTED CAMPS A two-week summer program for gifted fifth- through 12th-graders, the West Virginia Wesleyan College (WVWC) Gifted Camp offers classes in mathematics, physics, computer science, creative writing, history, and environmental science taught by top professors from WVWC. All students declared gifted by a school program or who score at the 97 percentile and higher on a standardized achievement test are eligible for enrollment. Students are grouped by grade level and housed on the school’s treelined campus, within walking distance to the dining hall, classrooms, gym, library, and playing fields. In addition to the academic classroom time, campers have access to the college’s swimming pool, basketball and tennis courts, music practice rooms, arts center, and library.

After classes the camp offers movies, guest speakers, and special trips. wvwc.edu/about

Throughout the program kids stay on the campus of the hosting university and spend days and afternoons in class. In the evenings and on weekends, students might take a trip, see a show, or go to a lecture. Some activities are engaging, and some are purely academic.

Most are both. “The great thing about this program is that it’s free. It is state-subsidized and kids don’t pay anything,” Claycomb says. “For the kinds of students who are college bound, these are opportunities that help them see beyond the rote learning of public schools. By disconnecting learning from grades, they get to become excited about learning and less stressed about grades.”

But creative learning isn’t limited to elite programs. Across North Central West Virginia students are excelling in science, math, and arts extracurriculars—and they’re having fun doing it.

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The region has a burgeoning arts scene, says Jason Young, director of Bridgeport-based Vintage Theatre Company. “Morgantown has WVU’s Creative Arts Center, and the things they bring in are phenomenal for the region. Fairmont State University has a nice program the Marion County community really supports. In Harrison County, the high schools are very active. Even as you go further south into Lewis and Upshur counties, there’s great stuff happening.”

In Harrison County alone the state boasts four award-winning, internationally recognized theater and choir programs at the middle and high school levels, but the arts don’t end at the ring of a school bell. Students have many extracurricular options to sharpen their skills, be it private lessons or school programs. In 2014 the county hosted its first weeklong summer camp open to all Harrison County students—public, private, or homeschooled. The free program covers all aspects of theater from acting, singing, and dancing to lighting, stage managing, props, and scenery. “The arts are growing and growing in Harrison County,” says Emily Moore, a Harrison County educator and coordinator of the theater camps. “We have recognized a need not just for our students, but for our community.”

Part of Harrison County’s success is due to private community support of the arts. “There’s less quantity outside of Morgantown, but there’s equal quality,” Young says of the local opportunities.

In addition to his work at the Vintage Theatre Company, Young is an unofficial artist-in-residence at Bridgeport High School, one of those award-winning Harrison County programs. The work he does in his private theater company is complementary to what is happening in the high schools. “We train and enhance students’ passions to help them grow their school programs,” he says. “What we do is less recreational and more specific. We’re working with kids who are really focused and trying to get to another level.” Vintage begins working with kids at a young age and mentors students up to their senior years of high school when the focus is on helping them achieve their artistic dreams at the collegiate level. This includes personalized help with applications and auditions.

For all the focus Harrison County has on its theater and show programs, Marion County is just as dedicated to music. High school bands in Marion travel nationwide to compete alongside their neighboring county high schools, and they bring home plenty of awards. The Academy for the Arts at Fairmont State University spearheads some of the personal development that allows students to take their school programs so far. The academy is open to students of all ages and offers private and classroom instruction across artistic disciplines. “Most of our instructors, being public school educators in the arts, are tying in what they do in the classrooms, bringing those techniques into By connecting women young and old the academy,” says with summer camps, internships, and Academy Director employment options, STEMPLOY is Leigh Anne Bolyard. advancing the participation of women in The program, only STEM-related fields. The organization was five years old, has founded and is led by women with more more than doubled than 20 years of combined experience in the number of science and technology education and students enrolled in promotion. 304.685.6530, stemploy.com its classes, the most popular of which are

WEST VIRGINIA TECHNOLOGY STUDENTS ASSOCIATION Ninth grade students at the Governor’s School for Math and Science work on activities together during the 2014 session.

private music classes. “We find that the kids really enjoy the private lesson experience and the one-on-one attention,” Bolyard says. Like in Harrison County, these aren’t just recreational activities. “The kids we have are very interested in the arts. They’re really getting to set goals and fine-tune their craft.”

COURTESY OF GSMS

STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Mountaineer Area Robotics—MARS for short—is based in Morgantown and pulls in kids from all over the region for a competitive, educational experience based on teamwork and robots.

MARS partners with 4-H, NASA, local school systems, WVU, and numerous corporate sponsors to provide hands-on educational opportunities to the statewide community and mentorship to other statewide robotics teams. Each year MARS students compete in the national First Robotics Challenge, a program where they are given a list of building requirements and challenged to create the best robot they can within the parameters. “The team model

An extracurricular competition for high school and middle school students, Technology Students Association is a yearlong program of technology education. Students analyze realworld problems in a variety of topics and present solutions at a statewide tech conference with the goal of advancing to a national competition.

we’ve had for six years is that it’s not about the robot,” says Phil Tucker, WVU laboratory specialist and co-leader of the program.

“It’s about everything else we get into, though, yes, we build a bunch of robots every year.” While building four robots each year MARS students also have hands-on experience with technology promotion in communities, outreach projects, presentations to youth groups, science museums, and parades. “The point is to show our community what could be done by a group of youth who are both driven and mentored,” Tucker says.

As driven as the kids are to find their own successes in technology challenges, it helps to have organizations like NASA in your backyard. “We consider ourselves STEM educators. We train other teachers and educators on how to implement activities and 77

LIFESTYLE

TEKids TEKids, based in Morgantown, is an after-school enrichment program that uses real-world applications to teach kids about technology, engineering, computers, and physics.

Students choose from several courses such as Data Miners, a class allowing students to analyze environmental data using online tools, or Techventors, in which students use assistive technology software to design and build devices based on customer requests.

NASA programs and tools in whatever learning environment they have,” says Todd Ensign, coordinator of the Educator Resource Center at NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation facility in Fairmont. “We are one-of-a-kind in the agency.” In 15 years the center has acquired $3 million in equipment it loans to West Virginia classrooms. Nearly 40,000 students in the state have benefited from the center, including programs like MARS and other competition teams such as Real World Design Challenge and Team America Rocketry Challenge. “Students aren’t doing a STEM experience for five hours, they’re doing it for five weeks or five months,” Ensign says. “This is an extremely deep involvement in STEM. This is the kind of program that really changes kids’ minds and views about what their careers will look like.” The number of students participating has increased over the years, and with it the number of West Virginia programs heading to national championships. In part this is because of the training provided by NASA on tools like 3D 78

Computer Aided Design programs and the center’s 3D printer.

The NASA center also provides a laboratory learning environment in Charleston that gives students a chance to use a NASA wind tunnel, fly the NASA model aircrafts, sit in planes to see how the controls work, run robots, and meet robotics engineers. “We are pioneering new opportunities for students,” Ensign says. “The pinnacle of our opportunities is our high school and our college internships—paid intern positions.” The opportunity is available to students within a 50-mile radius of the Fairmont site. During the internship, up to 20 high school interns and 10 college interns spend weeks working alongside NASA researchers. “I’m extremely jealous of the environment my 2-year-old son will grow up in,” Ensign says. “My nickname in school was Space Cadet. School wasn’t that much fun for me as a nerd—there wasn’t a robotics competition, there weren’t aeronautic competitions. Here my son will have an opportunity to participate in these types of programs.” ID

COURTESY OF NASA IV&V EDUCATOR RESOURCE CENTER

Fairmont’s NASA IV&V uses its resources and facilities to train West Virginia’s students and teachers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Bright Business Landscape Retreat to West Virginia for your business needs.

WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

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D-MAX PHOTOGRAPHY, COURTESY OF GLENMARK HOLDING

t’s easy to pick up and move when you know your destination is an outdoor paradise, with scenery to rival anything in National Geographic. It’s a lot easier when you know that paradise can host your business needs, transportation, and lodging. “In North Central West Virginia we have a business climate that is very receptive to growth,” says Kathy Wagner, president of the Harrison County Chamber of Commerce. “And we still have that small town atmosphere and community feel that major metropolitan communities don’t have.”

With high-tech business parks, access to federal agency anchors, and plenty of travel options connecting West Virginia with nearby metropolitan hubs, the commercial setting here couldn’t be riper for the picking.

LIFESTYLE

INFRASTRUCTURE BRIDGEPORT AND CLARKSBURG

When IT company Citynet needed to pick a location for its corporate headquarters, Drew Pomeroy, an executive with the company, says Bridgeport and Harrison County rose easily to the top. “The workforce is tremendous, the surrounding business activity helps breed success, and the location makes servicing all points of West Virginia very doable,” he says. Off the interstate in Bridgeport and near Clarksburg, a number of business and technology parks are popping up to make use of beautiful real estate, easy trade connections, and plenty of space.

Class A office space in Harrison County is located in the White Oaks Business Park and also in Charles Pointe, both located along interstate connections and near the FBI complex, according to Randy Spellman, director of community development for Bridgeport. “We have many businesses already operating in these two parks,” he says. At White Oaks Business Park in Bridgeport, business owners can rent, buy, or build. The 470-acre business park located just off I-79 offers Class A office space in a variety of sizes. White Oaks takes the “park” in “business park” seriously with a campus incorporating fitness trails and green spaces. Nearby, residential, recreational, and business-centric activities merge at Charles Pointe, a $1.4 billion mixed-use community spanning more than 1,700 acres in Bridgeport. Fiber optic cabling is provided to all commercial tenants, as well as a system of trails and sidewalks allowing easy access to restaurants and other amenities. More space is available in more mature developments like Cambridge Place and Eastpointe Business Park, also in Harrison County.

MORGANTOWN

“In Morgantown and Monongalia County there’s a lot of new space that would meet tech-company requirements,” says local developer Mark Nesselroad, an executive with Glenmark Holding, LLC. “Those buildings have fiber connectivity, security, data centers, and utility redundancy.”

Glenmark has developed a number of Class A options boasting fiber connectivity, security monitoring, and security systems in the doors, and Nesselroad can rattle off a list of 80

those office spaces, both available via his company and a number of others. Millions of dollars and hundreds of acres of prime real estate have gone into these facilities, and each has its own benefits.

Morgantown continues to develop and build its first-class inventory of office space both in its central business districts and at its gateways, according to Jack Thompson, director of business at the Morgantown Chamber of Commerce. “The WVU Research Park, the Morgantown Industrial Park, the Airport Office & Research Park, Chaplin Hill, and other developments offer businesses the opportunity to develop their own facilities or move into existing space,” he says.

Buildings such as Glenmark’s Canyon Road space are located within a few minutes of major interstates and the Morgantown airport outside of town, but still boast Class A security and connectivity. Others such as Glenmark’s United Center Office Complex, Metro Property’s Suncrest Towne Centre,

CLASS A OFFICE SPACE Tech firms and other professional businesses can’t locate just anywhere.

From services to aesthetics, these businesses need space that goes above and beyond. “It’s a different class of office space. Class A refers to the quality of construction and materials used—fixtures and equipment,” Mark Nesselroad says. Surfaces gleam in granite, wood, and other high-end materials, and the space is generally finished to suit tenant needs. “It’s a well-built structure at the higher end of the space market.” These spaces also offer state-of-the-art systems and convenient access to transportation corridors.

I-79 Technology Park in Fairmont is home to federal agencies and contractors alike.

FLYING HIGH* Businesses can get to distant clients or fly clients in easily from metro areas across the East Coast.

and a number of Petroplus properties such as the Marina Tower in the riverfront district offer mixed-use amenities in the heart of the community. “Some companies like to group together and collaborate.

The WVU Research Park would be good for that,” Nesselroad says. “The Gateway development past Star City would suit IT and tech firms. It’s good to have those Class A tenants with a mixture of office, retail, and restaurant amenities together.”

COURTESY OF WVHTC FOUNDATION

FAIRMONT

Marion County and the county seat of Fairmont also have numerous office buildings with Class A space, but one site stands out.

“The I-79 Technology Park houses many businesses that require Class A space and that is our premier office park in the county,” says Tina Shaw, director of the Marion County Chamber of Commerce. “With all the recent upgrades, including the new satellites and underground fiber and wiring, the park is

capable of handling any technology requests.”

Businesses looking to relocate or set up shop at the tech park have the possibility of free land, easy access to both the interstate and West Virginia’s biggest federal anchor offices, and top tech specs. Current tenants include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, NASA, and NOAA. “We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to substantially upgrade the electrical capacity of the park to provide whatever needs anyone could want,” says Jim Estep, president and CEO at the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation.

A new electrical substation and a recent telecommunications upgrade support the park’s data centers and cloud computing.

“We were selected four years ago to be the new home of one of NOAA’s most advanced supercomputer centers,” Estep says. “With that selection came a huge investment by NOAA. We now have several 10-gigabit connections running 24/7 to two of the country’s most important gigabit research networks: Internet2 and LambdaRail.”

While numerous contractors and businesses have chosen the tech park, throughout White Hall and downtown Fairmont are other office buildings that offer Class A space catering to the same type of businesses. “With the recent addition of the Alan B. Mollohan Gateway Connector, many technology businesses are choosing to locate in downtown Fairmont and outlying areas because of the quick access to I-79,” Shaw says. In downtown Fairmont, she says the Hennen Building and Veterans Square, owned and leased by McCabe Land Company, are both Class A. And Class A space is also available in several Marion County Industrial Park buildings owned by Green River Group.

NORTH CENTRAL WEST VIRGINIA AIRPORT 2000 Aviation Way Bridgeport, WV 26330 304.842.3400 flyckb.com

ALLEGIANT AIR Non-stop flights to Orlando Sanford International Airport in Sanford, Florida (on Thursdays and Sundays).

UNITED AIRLINES Daily flights to Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C.

MORGANTOWN MUNICIPAL AIRPORT 100 Hart Field Road Morgantown, WV 26505 304.291.7461 morgantownairport.com

SILVER AIRWAYS Three roundtrip flights daily to Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. Silver Airways in an operator for the United Express flights.

Other destinations including Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, and Chicago, and our nation’s beaches can be reached via one of the several other nearby airports including Huntington Tri-State Airport in Huntington, Yeager Airport in Charleston, and Pittsburgh International Airport just an hour from Morgantown. *Flights are subject to change.

Host your clients in comfort and style at one of the many lodging options available throughout West Virginia’s north central cities. Options are available to suit just about any need, from well-equipped and well-connected conference spaces to comfortable rooms close to dining, entertainment, and transit hubs.

MORGANTOWN

Historic Clarion Hotel Morgan An iconic boutique hotel in the heart of downtown Morgantown, Hotel Morgan combines modern comfort with vintage flair.

Amenities include a rooftop restaurant and bar perfect for an evening business meeting and a ballroom for large dinner parties, conferences, and conventions.

127 High Street, 304.292.8200, clarionhotelmorgan.com Lakeview Golf Resort & Spa This large resort just outside of Morgantown does double duty as a business center and an outdoor playground. Located on Cheat Lake, the facility's in-house dining and space for breakout sessions make it the perfect spot for a corporate getaway with options for fun.

1 Lakeview Drive, 304.594.1111, lakeviewresort.com Waterfront Place Hotel The ultimate luxury and business hotel beside the Monongahela River, the Waterfront Place Hotel offers indulgence and convenience. An on-site spa, indoor pool, state-of-the-art fitness facility, and convention rooms of all sizes round out the hotel’s offerings, while its location in an up-and-coming dining district places guests just a pleasant riverside walk away from some of the area’s finest food. 2 Waterfront Place, 304.296.1700, waterfrontplacehotel.com The Chestnut Hotel, 345 Chestnut Street, 304.777.4100, chestnuthotel.com Euro-Suites Hotel, 501 Chestnut Ridge Road, 304.598.1000, euro-suites.com Hampton Inn, 1053 Van Voorhis Road, 304.599.1200, hamptoninn3.hilton.com Hilton Garden Inn, 150 Suncrest Towne Centre Drive, 304.225.9500, hiltongardeninn3.hilton.com 82

Waterfront Place Hotel in Morgantown offers beautiful spaces for business meetings and conventions.

Residence Inn, 1046 Willowdale Road, 304.599.0237, marriott.com Suburban Extended Stay, 40 Sterling Drive, 304.291.2535, suburbanhotels.com

FAIRMONT

Clarion Inn Fairmont, 930 East Grafton Road, 304.366.5500, clarionhotel.com Fairfield Inn & Suites, 27 Southland Drive, 304.367.9150, marriott.com Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites, 2256 Landing Lane, 888.465.4329, hiexpress.com

BRIDGEPORT

Comfort Inn and Suites Off of Interstate 79 in the White Oaks Business Park area of Bridgeport, Comfort Suites offers easy access to plenty of attractions including dining, adventure, and entertainment.

285 White Oaks Boulevard, 304.933.3390, comfortsuites.com Courtyard by Marriott Also in the White Oaks Business Park and minutes from the North Central West Virginia Airport, this Marriott brand hotel has space for solo travelers and business groups alike. This

hotel has 2,000 square feet of meeting space, a full fitness center, and Starbucks coffee. 30 Shaner Drive, 304.842.0444, marriott.com Wingate by Wyndham In the Charles Pointe development in Bridgeport, Wingate, a Wyndham brand hotel, offers lodging amenities connected to the Bridgeport Conference Center, where there is space for everything from business meetings and retreats to weddings and parties. The hotel is within walking distance of favorite local restaurants and entertainment and offers easy access from the highway. 350 Conference Center Way, 304.808.1000, wingatehotels.com

NEARBY

Stonewall Resort A retreat in the heart of West Virginia’s beautiful landscapes, Stonewall Resort offers a relaxing space for meetings and conferences of any size just a short drive south of North Central West Virginia’s high-tech corridor. Catering, conference planning, team building, restaurants, spacious accommodations, an award-winning golf course, and a lake with fishing and boat rentals make this resort perfect for any business gathering.

940 Resort Drive, Roanoke, 888.278.8150, stonewallresort.com

CARLA WITT FORD

LIFESTYLE

BUSINESS HOTELS

LIVING IN NORTH CENTRAL

WEST VIRGINIA

A PLAYGROUND OF ADVENTURE, HISTORY, AND CULTURE WRITTEN BY KATIE GRIFFITH

ELIZABETH ROTH

Winding south from North Central West Virginia through the Mountain Lakes region, Interstate 79 connects Morgantown with the state capital of Charleston. The area between Morgantown and historic Weston has been dubbed the Technology Corridor due to the prevalence of industries like higher education, law enforcement, and health care. But neither the federal highway number nor the industry-centric tag do justice to a region of unsurpassed natural beauty and rich history. By day you might see professionals wearing everything from sport coats to lab coats engaged in cutting-edge research and innovation. But when the weekend rolls around, it’s time to shut the laptops, exchange reading glasses for sunglasses, and discover why West Virginia is “Almost Heaven.”

LIFESTYLE

CONVENIENTLY LOCATED OFF OF I-79 AND I-68, Morgantown is a multi-faceted community of nearly 30,000 (130,000 for the Morgantown metro area) nestled between two major waterways— the Cheat and Monongahela rivers. If Morgantown was ever a secret to the outside world, it isn’t now. “There are a lot of aspects that provide a great quality of life to someone in Morgantown,” says Cindy Coffindaffer, marketing director for the Greater Morgantown Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We have a low crime rate, a lot of volunteer opportunities around the community, a low unemployment rate, and we also have a growing city. In the last 10 years Morgantown has seen a tremendous amount of economic growth.” Morgantown is making national headlines as a haven for entrepreneurs with its thriving economy and is quickly becoming known as a world-class destination for outdoor enthusiasts, thrillseekers, and families alike. Morgantown is home to the state’s largest university, West Virginia University. This internationally renowned land-grant institution draws half its students from outside the state—adding diversity to the local culture and a global vision to the city’s consciousness.

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While Morgantown has plenty to offer on its own, it’s also situated in an unbeatable location between major East Coast economic hubs.

The cost of living is a little higher here than in most other regions of the state, but for good reason. In 2012 Forbes named this thriving metropolitan area seventh overall in “Best Small Places for Business and Career” and third in job growth. In just a few years Morgantown has been highlighted in The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, and Southern Living—to name a few. What folks are discovering is Morgantown is much more than a quintessential college town. It’s a place where history comes alive, the arts and culture flourish, and the economy prospers. From historic neighborhoods like South Park to world-class dining to outdoor playgrounds like Cheat Lake and nearby hiking, biking, and camping at Coopers Rock State Forest, it is no wonder the town is repeatedly listed as one of the best places in the nation to live. “In Morgantown you can live in the city and have all the amenities of shopping, dining, and education,” Coffindaffer says. “But you can also step out 15 or 20 minutes away and experience a tremendous amount of outdoor recreation. It’s what makes us unique.”

ELIZABETH ROTH

MORGANTOWN

Morgantown is a haven for entrepreneurs and outdoor enthusiasts alike.

THE RAIL-TRAIL

For cyclists, walkers, and runners, the region’s rail-trails—developed on now defunct railroads—create a system of pathways between Monongalia, Marion, and Preston counties. The trails stretch almost 50 miles, with many access sites around Morgantown. A popular entry point is the Wharf District’s main portal to the Caperton Trail, which is part of the city’s extensive paved routes. The system also includes the Mon River Trail, which winds through forested paths, and the more challenging Deckers Creek Trail. From Morgantown avid cyclists can bike as far north as Point Marion in Pennsylvania and south to Fairmont to spend a day at the historic Prickett’s Fort State Park. montrails.org

MORGANTOWN IS A CULTURAL HUB

ELIZABETH ROTH

It’s hard to separate Morgantown from West Virginia University. The university is a center of activity from cultural events at the Creative Arts Center to community lectures and classes to the school’s beloved sports teams. On WVU football game days in Morgantown the city becomes the largest in West Virginia as thousands of fans across the state and the country come home. Blue and gold decorate houses, businesses, cars, pets, and people alike—and for good reason. WVU is a newly minted member of the Big 12 Conference, one of the top five collegiate sports conferences in the country, and holds records, awards, and honors in men’s and women’s sports across the board.

The school takes care of its fans, too, with regular upgrades to stadiums and arenas.

A $21 million state of the art baseball park is slated to open for the 2015 season, while renovations and upgrades are ongoing at the WVU football stadium.

HEALTH CARE Morgantown boasts world class health care in the WVU Healthcare system, which spends millions each year on new technology and facilities. Its Ruby Memorial Hospital has been recognized as a top regional hospital and the best in West Virginia by U.S. News and World Report time and again. The hospital has also been

recognized as a high-performer within 12 specialties including cancer, neurology and neurosurgery, and cardiology.

DIVERSITY Diversity breeds tolerance and rich cultural experiences, and Morgantown is one of the most diverse cities in the state. As a result, the town has a wide selection of ethnic restaurants and cultural events, both sponsored by WVU and organic to the varying interests of community members.

From Japanese to Kenyan to Indian to Thai, there are plenty of culinary options.

ARTS Morgantown’s vibrant creative community offers artistic experiences large and small.

National productions regularly visit area theaters, while WVU’s Creative Arts Center offers an incredible schedule of shows—from the nationally renowned Mountain Stage productions to classic plays and musicals featuring both visiting and in-house artists.

The Monongalia Arts Center, locally known as the MAC, hosts an eclectic assortment of literary, performing, and visual arts. Nearby, the renovated Metropolitan Theatre is home to West Virginia Public Theatre as well as local performances. The Art Museum of West Virginia University houses the university’s 3,000 piece art collection as well as touring exhibits.

FARMERS’ MARKET Local restaurants and residents alike make great use of the Morgantown area’s farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture programs. With a number of small farms and artisanal shops around the city, there’s plenty for a locavore to choose from. If you’re strolling through historic downtown Morgantown on a summertime Saturday morning, be sure to stop into the Morgantown Farmers’ Market (400 Spruce Street, 304.993.2410, morgantownfarmers. org) for a taste of local culture.

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LIFESTYLE

Black Bear Burritos This local favorite builds burritos with ingredients ranging from sirloin steak and shrimp to tofu, jicama, and Thai peanut curry. 132 Pleasant Street, 3119 University Avenue, blackbearburritos.com Boston Beanery An award-winning Morgantown icon, the Beanery serves up some of the best wings, burgers, and comfort food in the city. 321 High Street, 383 Patteson Drive, 3062 Point Marion Road, bostonbeanery.com Kenyan Café Kenyan Café has won local awards for its menu of authentic, organic Kenyan cuisine. There are options for everyone, including vegetarians, vegans, and gluten-free diners. 1137 Van Voorhis Road, 304.598.3044, kenyancafe.com Mountain State Brewing Company This West Virginia brewery offers fresh beer and the best wood-fired flatbread pizzas for miles, not to mention a popular deck overlooking the Caperton Trail and Monongahela River. 54 Clay Street, 304.241.1976, mountainstatebrewing.com New Day Bakery Nestled in a popular downtown neighborhood, this bakery sells everything from daily pastries to seasonal loaves to pizza topped with some of the area’s most interesting combinations. 89 Kingwood Street, 304.292.7979, newdaybakery.com Sargasso This fusion, fine-dining restaurant is a favorite for everything from business lunches to Mother’s Day brunches. 215 Don Knotts Boulevard, 304.554.0100, sargassomorgantown.com Stefano’s Fine dining under a bowling alley—might seem strange, but Stefano’s has one of the best spaces and some of the best food in town. 735 Chestnut Ridge Road, 304.581.6930

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CLOCKWISE: Make reservations early for a fine Italian dinner at Stefano’s.

The Cheat River is a wild ride. Fans fill Milan Puskar Stadium on fall weekends.

High Street is a shopping and dining mecca in downtown Morgantown.

OUTDOORS

Cheat River & Cheat Lake An 80-mile long tributary to the Monongahela River, the Cheat flows through the Allegheny Mountains. Take a white water thrill ride at the infamous Cheat Canyon, just 45 minutes out of town. Closer to Morgantown, Coopers Rock State Forest offers a breathtaking view of the stream as it flows into a sparkling reservoir known as Cheat Lake. There the mountain water awaits boaters, swimmers, and fishers alike. Rent a boat, hop on a cruise at Lakeside Marina, or grab a bite to eat at Edgewater Marina’s seasonal Whippoorwill Bar & Grill. I-68 East, Exit 10

MOUNTAINEER PRIDE

West Virginians bleed gold and blue and that is never more evident than in Morgantown, home of West Virginia University. As the state’s largest public land grant university, WVU was founded in 1867 to teach agriculture and engineering. WVU has shaped some influential minds and hearts over the years, from NBA hall-of-famer Jerry West to Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers to retired NASA Astronaut Jon McBride. Today the school has expanded to more than a dozen colleges and schools, many of which are focused on answering some of our world’s biggest problems from environmental protection to tourism. With campuses in the heart of town, WVU has a strong influence on the culture and pace of life in Morgantown. For more information, visit WVU’s Visitors Center. 1 Waterfront Place, 550 University Avenue, 800.344.9881, visit.wvu.edu

Coopers Rock State Forest Visitors are awed year after year by the steep climbs and panoramic views of Coopers Rock State Forest. Native plants and animals within the forest attract thousands of bird watchers, biologists, and nature lovers each year. Locals escape to the mountains for an afternoon of hiking, picnicking, and general frolicking in the outdoors.

A favorite for adventure-minded mountain bikers, Coopers Rock State Forest offers dozens of trails of varying lengths over 13,000 acres. Thrill-seeking rock climbers can sign in at the concession stand and gift shop near the scenic overlook—one of the most photographed views in the state— then take a climb. Hunting is permitted in designated areas, and fishing in the six-acre lake is a favorite pastime, although state licenses are required.

After a day of escapades, adventurers will find campsites with electric hookups and a rest area with hot showers as well as picnic sites, grills, and playgrounds. Several rustic picnic shelters are available for reservation.

Constructed of American chestnut, 11 of these shelters are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 61 County Line Drive, Bruceton Mills, coopersrockstateforest.com West Virginia Botanic Garden What was once a reservoir supplying water to residents is now 82 acres of lush forest—a favorite secret of gardeners and runners alike. The expert volunteers at the West Virginia Botanic Garden regularly lead free nature walks with topics ranging from bird watching to attracting butterflies to explorations of wetland habitats. 1061 Tyrone Road, wvbg.org

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CARLA WITT FORD

FAIRMONT NEARLY 19,000 PEOPLE live in this North Central West Virginia city, where Italian food is king, the technology industry is booming, and there’s no excuse for boredom. The city boasts a couple of notable West Virginia firsts, as home of the state’s official food, the pepperoni roll, and home of the first Father’s Day memorial. “It’s a much slower pace of life here,” says Leisha Elliot of the Marion County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“You feel very comfortable with your kids and family being outside. We have a great park system, great restaurants, and a lot of new startup businesses that are really different—they cater to different interests.”

Over the last several years, the city has burst with a spirit of growth, capitalizing on its position as an early West Virginia town and a small business hub. Tree-lined sidewalks move residents from their stately turn-ofthe-century homes—still an undiscovered gold mine in West Virginia’s housing market—past established restaurants and businesses famous throughout the state.

Marion County was first established as part of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1842. Fairmont, the county seat, was a point of contention during the Civil War. Today

Fairmont finds itself in the heart of the High-Tech Corridor, but nearby other Marion County towns offer Fairmont workers a chance to relax from the fast-paced tech industry in a lush rural setting. “People like that slow rural lifestyle with a pool, a swing set, and relationships with neighbors. But in a short drive they have accessibility to schools, shopping, restaurants, and larger markets,” Elliot says.

The West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation carved out a space just off the interstate in the early ’90s.

NASA opened facilities there in 1993 and, as the technology park has steadily added new tenants, Fairmont has seen new jobs pour into the city in the areas of research, development, and information technology.

Fairmont State University, offering degree programs in everything from national security and intelligence to folklore studies, sits at the heart of the city. With nearby recreation at Prickett’s Fort State Park and Valley Falls State Park, Fairmont successfully navigates its role as both a hub of history and culture and a gateway to outdoor exploration.

LIFESTYLE

Colasessano’s For 50-plus years, this restaurant has been serving hearty, homemade meals like antipasti, hoagies, pepperoni rolls, and thick pizzas as well as treats like fried pickles and gelato. 506 Pennsylvania Avenue, 304.363.9713 9705 Mall Loop, 304.363.0571 colasessanos.com

CLOCKWISE: Valley Falls is an offthe-beaten-path escape. Prickett’s Fort State Park brings history to life. The Poky Dot is classic diner fare, but bigger and better.

Muriale’s attracts hungry diners from all over the Mountain State for a fine, filling meal with great service.

Country Club Bakery This small family-owned bakery is the birthplace of West Virginia’s favorite snack, the pepperoni roll. 1211 Country Club Road, 304.363.5690 Dairy Creme Corner Don’t miss the biggest ice cream cones in town. Locals can’t get enough of sweet treats like the funnel cake sundae. Open seasonally.

187 Homewood Avenue, 304.366.6809

Muriale’s Italian Restaurant & Catering Pasta lovers all over North Central West Virginia flock to Muriale’s, a family restaurant serving up some of the best pasta, homemade meatballs, and sandwiches for more than 40 years.

1742 Fairmont Avenue, 304.363.3190, murialesrestaurant.com

CARLA WITT FORD

Heston Farm More than 200 acres overlooking the Tygart Valley River are home to a winery, distillery, and restaurant at Heston Farm. 1602 Tulip Lane, 304.366.9463, hestonfarm.com

Pufferbelly’s Ice Cream Station Check out Pufferbelly’s for handdipped ice cream and a full menu of soups, salads, and sandwiches.

1024 Fairmont Avenue, 304.363.3221, pufferbellysicecreamstation.com

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NIKKI BOWMAN

Poky Dot The menu at this whimsical diner includes an all-day breakfast with pancakes piled high, omelets brimming with cheese, and other traditional favorites. 1111 Fairmont Avenue, 304.366.3271, thepokydot.com

CARLA WITT FORD

CARLA WITT FORD

OUTDOORS

Prickett’s Fort State Park West Virginia—then western Virginia—was still considered the wild frontier in 1774, when Prickett’s Fort served as a refuge from conflicts with Native Americans. Named for pioneer Captain Jacob Prickett, this historical site was reconstructed in 1976 and now serves as a living history museum where interpreters act out daily life in colonial times. Watch blacksmiths tend forges, spinners and weavers create traditional crafts, and gunsmiths recreate 18th century firearm manufacture. Nearby, the restored 19th century Job Prickett House— built by Jacob Prickett’s great-grandson— offers visitors a chance to revisit yet another moment in history. Tickets to the fort are available at the visitors’ center, where history buffs can peruse the research library, buy a bauble at the gift shop, and admire the upstairs gallery.

Outside the historical area, the park is also a great place for picnics, fishing, and concerts. A 400-seat amphitheater hosts arts shows throughout the summer, and Prickett’s Creek and Bay offers boat trailer parking and a launch ramp. If you’d rather see more of the native flora and fauna of the region, a nature trail developed by Fairmont State University includes interpretive stations. Walkers, joggers, and cyclists will also love the three-mile Marion County Trail, known as the MC Trail, connecting the park to the city. 88 Park Entrance Road, 304.363.3030, prickettsfortstatepark.com Valley Falls State Park Hear the rush of water at this scenic treasure. Take Exit 137 off of I-79 and follow Route 310/Grafton Road south until you see signs for Valley Falls Road. This former lumber and gristmill community saw heavy flood damage in the 1880s. Although it never recovered as a residential area, it has become a hiking, biking, and kayaking paradise with 18 miles of trails and a famous series of foaming falls created by the Tygart Valley River. Pack a picnic and enjoy one of the area’s rustic wood shelters. Playgrounds, a volleyball area, horseshoe pits, and quiet fishing spots provide fun for the whole family. 304.367.2719, valleyfallsstatepark.com 91

CARLA WITT FORD

LIFESTYLE

BRIDGEPORT EIGHTEEN MILES SOUTH OF FAIRMONT, travelers will pass through Bridgeport and Clarksburg, both saturated in history and culture and home to great shopping and dining. Settled in the mid-1700s, Bridgeport is located at the crossroads of historic U.S. Route 50 and I-79 and is home to burgeoning industries like oil and gas, aerospace, and health care. “Bridgeport is the best of small town living but has the amenities of a larger community,” says Michelle Duez, executive director of the Bridgeport Convention and Visitors Bureau. “An airport, a mall, aerospace industry, the FBI, and unique restaurants 92

provide jobs and things to do. You can get to D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Charlotte all within a few hours’ drive.” With specialty shops and dining and staunch community pride in local businesses, schools, and youth sports, the city combines a future vision with faith- and family-oriented small town roots. “The cost of living is reasonable and it’s a more laid back style of living,” Duez says. “There is no hour long rush hour traffic to fight. Bridgeport is very family oriented and at any given time, you can drive by parks and fields with some sort of recreation going on with families.”

FARMERS’ MARKET Open year-round, the Bridgeport Farmers Market at Charles Pointe sells everything from soaps to salad greens. The market takes place outside on Sundays May through October, and then once per month inside at the Bridgeport Conference Center November through April.

LEFT: Bridgeport offers a variety of recreation including plenty of ways to cool off.

BELOW: The Bridgeport Recreation Complex opened in 2012.

Almost Heaven Desserts This urbanstyle coffee shop offers a multitude of baked goods, chocolate truffles, and liquid caffeine within its brick walls and exposed ceiling beams. A must-try culinary experience in Bridgeport, sit down for cheesecake and coffee.

100 West Main Street, 304.848.2500 Meagher’s Irish Pub This eater offers Irish-inspired pub food and a wide selection of craft beer, whiskey, and scotch. 26 Betten Court, 304.484.9200, meaghersirishpub.com Mia Margherita Pizza lovers adore this new joint where Neapolitan-style pizzas are baked in a unique coal-fired pizza oven, mixing West Virginia’s heritage in the best way. 139 Conference Center Way, 304.808.6400, miamargherita.com Mountaineer Grille This haven for Mountaineer fans offers craft beers on tap and a large menu of home-style items in a casual atmosphere. 166 Barnett Run Road, 304.848.7500

GREATER BRIDGEPORT CVB; BRIDGEPORT PARKS AND RECREATION

FAMILY FUN Bridgeport Public Library (1200 Johnson Avenue, 304.842.8248) is nationally ranked, has thousands of books and magazines, and boasts weekly events for adults and kids.

Bridgeport Skate World (705 Masonic Avenue, 304.842.4426) has open roller-skating sessions for all ages throughout the week and is popular with youth on weekends.

Bridgeport Recreation Complex (bridgeportreccomplex.com) Constructed in 2012, this recreation complex houses four baseball and softball fields equipeed with irrigated grass, large brick dugouts, bullpens, and batting cages. A three-acre multipurpose field can host soccer, lacrosse, and football, while a full-size basketball courts, walking trails, and a picnic shelter sit nearby. “The Bridgeport Recreation Complex is a state of the art baseball/softball wagon wheel,” Duez says. “The best in West Virginia.”

The complex is home to yearly baseball tournaments drawing visitors from Ohio, Maryland, and Virginia.

Deegan & Hinkle Lakes Park bustles with activity all summer long with playgrounds, walking paths, and fishing at two stocked lakes. Locals also love visiting the park to play tennis or grill out.

Kross Kreek Farm (725 Glade Run Road, 304.842.1875, krosskreekfarm.com) offers riding lessons by the hour.

Oliverio’s Ristorante Another culinary treasure, the Oliverio family has owned and operated its flagship location in Bridgeport for generations. It’s a favorite for townies and visitors alike.

507 East Main Street, 304.842.7388, oliveriosristorante.com Provence Market Café & Marketplace A short jaunt off of I-79, Provence Market offers hungry diners a taste of fine French cuisine. Have a nice sit-down dinner and browse the surrounding eclectic boutiques at the nearby Shoppes of Averil Place. 603 South Virginia Avenue, 304.848.0911, provencemarketcafe.com

Pete Dye Golf Club (801 Aaron Smith Drive, 304.842.2801), is a private course designed by world-famous architect Pete Dye and ranked as one of the top 50 golf courses in the country.

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THERE’S A REASON THE NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES NAMED CLARKSBURG, West Virginia, Small City of the Year in 2011. The county seat of Harrison County and just 10 minutes west of Bridgeport on U.S. 50, Clarksburg is a historic town with a modern vision.

Incorporated in 1785, the area has one of the nation’s lowest crime rates and is situated in the heart of the state’s growing technology industry. Its roots go back to the American Revolution, though the city boomed during the early 19th century, famous for its glass production. Major employers in both Clarksburg and Bridgeport today are the FBI, United Hospital Center, Merrick Engineering, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and Bombardier. With a low cost of living, a population of 17,000, and tons of culture, residents have the best of small town USA in Clarksburg.

The Fifth Floor A unique dining experience, The Fifth Floor boasts one of the best nighttime views of the city. 134 South Third Street, 304.326.5555 Julio’s Café This a family-owned restaurant has passed recipes and ownership down through generations.

Located in historic Glen Elk Village, Julio’s is an authentic old-world Italian experience in the heart of West Virginia’s technology centers. 501 Baltimore Avenue, 304.622.2592 Minard’s Spaghetti Inn Fill up with heaping plates of family-style Italian food at this local institution. 813 Pike Street, 304.623.1711 Oliverio Italian Style Peppers A trip to Clarksburg is never complete without picking up a case of these peppers.

From Italian-style peppers in sauce to banana peppers in vinegar, this familyowned business does it all. Take home a box stuffed with your favorite flavors from their warehouse, grab a few jars to sample from the local grocery store, or order online. 280 North Ohio Avenue, 304.622.4959, oliveriopeppers.us

The Italian Heritage Festival brings thousands of people to downtown Clarksburg every year.

FESTIVALS

No matter the season, you’ll find a reason to celebrate with fairs and festivals in the cities of Clarksburg and Bridgeport. Every year residents gather in Bridgeport for festivities like the Benedum Festival or the Scottish Festival. With pipe bands, country dancing, sheep herding demonstrations, and extreme Scottish games, the Scottish Festival is just one of the ways Bridgeport natives celebrate part of their heritage. Late summer gives way to one of the biggest events in West Virginia, the West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival (wvihf.com)—one of the top four Italian festivals in the nation, according to the National Sons of Italy. The Italian festival attracts more than 100,000 visitors to Clarksburg every summer with authentic cuisine, a special children’s area, and top entertainers in support of preserving and promoting Italian-American heritage. Every September Clarksburg hosts the West Virginia Black Heritage Festival, and since 2006 has been home to the annual Glen Elk Wine, Music and Arts festival. The Blackberry Festival, a three-day celebration of blackberry dishes, arts and crafts, and sports in the Clarksburg City Park is another large draw.

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Ritzy Lunch This historic joint in downtown Clarksburg has been serving its famous hot dogs since the 1930s.

456 West Pike Street, 304.622.3690, ritzylunchwv.com Tomaro’s Bakery At Tomaro’s Bakery you can pick up great Italian-style bread and pepperoni rolls, another West Virginia favorite. 411 N. 4th Street, 304.622.0691 Wonder Bar For an elegant meal, set aside an evening for the Wonder Bar, known for its mouthwatering steaks.

Wonder Bar Road, 304.622.1451, wonderbarsteakhouse.com KATIE HANLON

LIFESTYLE

CLARKSBURG

Forensic science solves more than crimes.

research.wvu.edu

It uncovers history in the present. And tells us what life was like for a World War I African-American soldier whose helmet carries evidence of battles survived. It partners disciplines to find answers – and uses science to bring the past to light.

Fast Facts

Thousands of jobs, millions of dollars, and top ranked schools are all part of the identification intelligence industry in West Virginia.

8.3% of North Central West Virginia’s population has graduate or professional degrees, compared with 7.8% in the nation.

6,500 jobs in North Central West Virginia’s technology industry

Marshall University is the only university in the nation operating a Combined DNA Index System laboratory testing convicted offender samples and forensic casework.

$1.7B TWO OF THREE

of U.S. News and World Report’s highest-ranked high schools in West Virginia in 2014 are in the north central counties.

There are 6 national parks in the state.

2,000 The Mountain State has more than 2,000 miles of streams and rivers.

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The tech industry creates $1.7B in output and $975M in value added to the WV economy in a year.

9 OUT OF 10 top employers in North Central West Virginia are in higher education, health care, pharmaceuticals, or biometrics.

TM

innovative industries

The i-79 Development Council is a regional marketing and business development organization that serves North Central West Virginia.

Our Primary Industries: • integrated aerospace - operations include research,

design and manufacturing for aerospace development

• independent energy - a reliable source

for jobs in extensive research, energy production, and utility generating facilities

Morgantown • identification intelligence - rapidly evolving area Fairmont

of science involving biometrics, cyber security, data Clarksburg analysis, and forensics Weston

• information technologies - use of

computers to collect large and complex data beyond the ability of commonly used software tools Charleston TM

regional innovation reaching global markets

304.680.7932 www.i79dc.org