## T. David Filson

The Pennsylvania State University

Penn State Cooperative Extension and Outreach

401 Ag. Administration

University Park, PA 16802

Ph: (814) 863-6424 --- Fax: (814) 863-7776

Email: DFilson@psu.edu

**David Filson** is the [emergency preparedness and response
coordinator]{.underline} for Penn State Cooperative Extension. As
emergency preparedness and response coordinator, Dave coordinates the
communication and interaction among Cooperative Extension
administration, faculty, and field-based educators and other agencies,
including the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania
Emergency Management Agency, Pennsylvania Department of Homeland
Security, and County Emergency Management Agencies. In this role, Dave
helps ensure Penn State Cooperative Extension\'s preparedness to play an
effective and key role in the event of an emergency situation. Dave also
serves as partnership leader for Penn State Cooperative Extension. In
this role, he serves as a liaison to the Directors office with state and
federal agencies and other organizations. He is responsible for
building, maintaining and enhancing professional connections and funding
partnerships with a variety of agencies and organizations that share
common goals with Penn State Cooperative Extension.

Filson is the Vice Chair of the Extension Disaster Education Network,
(EDEN), a collaborative multi-state effort by Extension Services across
the country to improve the delivery of educational resources to citizens
affected by disasters.

Filson was an instrumental partner in funding and establishing the
Center for Public Health Preparedness at Penn State. Through a
partnership with Battelle and Penn State, the project addressed and
identified the network linkages, strengths, and challenges of the
emergency response plans for Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, and
Pennsylvania Department of Health, and how they intersected. Continued
activity with the CPHP is to address the importance of wildlife as
sentinels for Zoonotic Disease, and County-level preparedness assessment

Filson co-authored and co-edited a series of courses on Agricultural
Emergencies that has received authorization from the Office of Grants
and Training. These courses will be used to train first responders who
are involved with emergencies involving agricultural facilities.

He has served by invitation on development committees as subject matter
expert for Emergency Response extensive training curricula with Saint
Josephs University Early Responders Distance Learning Center, and USDA
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) for a series of
courses titled " Introduction to Agro terrorism, Agriculture, and its
Industries, and University of Pittsburg at Bradford PA with the
development of training material for first responders entitled ; " What
All Rural Responders Must Know about Health Emergencies."

Filson is Co-Principal Investigator for a national project for
eXtension. He is coordinating an educational project to identify the
expert research talent in the area of Flooding and Agro Security.
Research information on these two topics will be gathered, reedited
reformatted and entered into a national educational data base that will
be available to the public year project

Filson was invited to participate with the development of the State of
Pennsylvania 2006 Strategic Initiative funding to the Department of
Homeland Security. He serves on the Pennsylvania FBI agricultural
Terrorism advisory committee. He is a member of the South Central
Mountains Regional Counter Terrorism \\Task Force, and had provided
training to Emergency responders at Pennsylvania Emergency Management
Agency (PEMA) regional training on agro terrorism.