Certificate Courses
Certified Secure Researcher Professional Course Series.
If you are a research security officer, facility security officer, research administrator, export control specialist, contracts administrator, or research program manager, consider becoming an expert on research security and compliance by completing the professional certificates offered. These certificate courses are designed to train individuals on the fundamental areas of expertise needed for Research Security Officer roles. Completing each course in the five-course series successfully will result in a certificate of completion for each course.
The Five-Course Certification Series
Course 1: Research Security Fundamentals
Research security is a rapidly growing field of practice focused on mitigating risks that are unique to the research enterprise. This course provides an introduction to key concepts related to identifying, assessing, and mitigating research security risks.
- Explain the importance of research security management
- Identify tangible and intangible research program assets
- Describe internal and external threats to research organizations
- Describe best practices for implementing research security
- Summarize how research sponsors are responding to federal guidance
Course 2: Understanding Insider Threats
In this course, you will explore essential strategies for protecting research assets, both tangible and intangible. You will learn how to safeguard physical items like laboratory equipment and drug prototypes, as well as intellectual property such as patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.
- Understand the profiles and behavioral indicators of insider risks
- Safeguard physical laboratory assets and equipment
- Protect intellectual property, patents, and trade secrets
- Mitigate risks of data loss, leakage, or competitive espionage
Course 3: Elicitation
This course is designed to equip individuals with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate and counteract elicitation techniques. Elicitation is a technique where threat actors extract sensitive information from well-meaning individuals without their awareness.
- Identify common elicitation tactics and verbal triggers
- Recognize subtle attempts to gather non-public research data
- Implement defensive conversational countermeasures
- Protect proprietary project assets while maintaining professional courtesy
Course 4: Travel Security
In this course, you will explore the crucial aspects of travel security, focusing on the unique risks researchers face when traveling abroad, especially to potentially hostile regions. You will learn how to identify and mitigate physical, cyber, and environmental threats to safeguard your research assets.
- Identify physical, cyber, and environmental threats while traveling
- Recognize intelligence-gathering and elicitation attempts during transit
- Apply device security best practices (loaner laptops, encrypted connections)
- Secure data integrity and maintain research compliance on the move
Course 5: Best Practices in Research Security Management
This capstone pulls together the concepts covered by the practice of research security. The course includes useful case studies, a summary of the roles and responsibilities of the research security team, and additional resources to help mature your research security program.
- Analyze case studies of corporate and academic security breaches
- Define roles and responsibilities for research security officers
- Design incident response and mitigation procedures
- Utilize compliance tools to track and self-certify program maturity
Become a Certified Security Professional
Acquire the tools, methodologies, and training credentials required to lead research compliance audits.