Thomas Arminio, Captain, USN (Ret.)

Thomas Arminio is a 1977 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a 1996 graduate of the U.S. Naval War College. Prior to joining Penn State Harrisburg, Captain Arminio spent 24 years in a variety of challenging and demanding assignments in the U.S. Navy, retiring in 2001, and spent nearly six years as director of emergency management services in a private-sector consulting firm.

He is currently a faculty instructor in the Penn State iMPS program, the iMPS program coordinator, and the Penn State Harrisburg IC CAE Grant symposium planner. 

Jeremy Plant, PhD

(Virginia), Professor of Public Administration and Public Policy

Jeremy F. Plant is the coordinator of the graduate programs in public administration in the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg, where he has taught since 1988. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. Plant taught at George Mason University and the University at Albany, SUNY. Dr. Plant graduated magna cum laude from Colgate University and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received master's and doctoral degrees in government from the University of Virginia. He is a Vietnam-era veteran who served in the Military Police Corps. Dr. Plant's research focuses on the areas of administrative ethics, homeland security, and transportation policy and administration. His publications have appeared in the Public Administration Review, the American Review of Public Administration, the Review of Policy Research, Public Integrity, the Journal of Urban Affairs, the International Journal of Public Administration, Public Works Management & Policy, and several other journals. Dr. Plant has also written/edited two books and contributed a number of chapters to multi-authored books. He has presented more than seventy conference papers on a variety of topics. He is a founding member of the American Society for Public Administration's Section on Ethics and Section on Transportation Policy and Administration and currently serves on the executive committee of each. He chaired the Section on Transportation Policy and Administration from 1998 to 2000 and has been appointed to several committees of the ASPA and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.

Peter Forster, PhD

(Penn State), Instructor

Peter K. Forster holds a doctorate in political science (international relations) from Penn State and is an instructor in the Department of Political Science. He is also the associate director of Penn State Outreach's international and homeland security initiatives. After participating on a number of working groups in NATO's Partnership for Peace Consortium since 2001, he was asked to contribute to NATO's Partnership Action Plan on Defense Institution Building and is the project manager for the Public Administration and Good Governance Reference Curriculum part of this initiative.

Dr. Forster's research focuses on security sector reform, NATO policy, and terrorism. He is the co-author of a book on military burden sharing beyond NATO's traditional area of operation (2005) and has published articles on U.S. interests in central Asia and the Caucasus, security sector reform in Uzbekistan and Ukraine, and the role of intelligence in homeland security. He serves on the AFRICOM Resource Group and has contributed to the development of the Department of Homeland Security's Professional Development and Strategic Studies curriculum. He also serves on the Homeland Security Defense/Education Consortium's subcommittee on curriculum development and works with the Naval Postgraduate School's University and Agency Partnership Initiative. At Penn State he teaches courses on terrorism, international relations theory, Middle East politics, U.S. foreign policy, and war in world politics.

Jim Powers, PhD

(U.S. Army), Retired Colonel

James F. Powers, Jr. currently serves as a consultant for two governmental organizations whose mission nexus is with homeland security and defense — Penn State and the U.S. Special Operations Command. Powers was appointed as Pennsylvania's Director of Homeland Security on June 5, 2006, and retired from that position in October 2010. As director, Powers served as the Commonwealth's primary point-of-contact on homeland security issues and the governor's senior advisor on homeland security issues for the nation's 6th most populous state comprising 67 counties, over 2,500 municipalities, and 500 school districts.

From October 2001 through mid 2006, Colonel Powers served as a special operations consultant with KWG Consulting of Waterford, Virginia; an adjunct faculty instructor with the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; and a senior fellow with the Joint Special Operations University, U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. As a senior fellow with the JSOU he authored Civil-Military Operations and Professional Military Education (JSOU Press, May 2006) and Filling Special Operations Gaps with Civilian Expertise (December 2006).

Before serving as a special operations consultant and senior fellow, Colonel Powers served 30 years as a career U.S. Army Special Forces officer with assignments in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Far East, and the CIA. Mr. Powers is a graduate of the University of Alabama (B.A. German, 1969); the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (1986); and the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania (1996). He holds a master's in public administration (MPA, 1996) from Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.