SENTRY Researcher Henry Medeiros Presents at Airport Resilience Workshop
SENTRY researcher Henry Medeiros joined 37 airport operators, researchers, government representatives, and industry partners at the Strategic Partnerships for Enhancing Airport Resilience (SPEAR) workshop, held August 17–19, 2026, at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). The workshop brought together representatives from DFW, Tampa International Airport, and Gainesville Regional Airport, along with researchers from 10 universities, to explore how science and technology can help airports prepare for and recover from increasingly complex disruptions.
The three-day workshop focused on developing a science-based, threat-agnostic approach to airport resilience. As Medeiros explained, airports face disruptions ranging from extreme weather and cyber failures to infrastructure constraints and operational demand, while “traditional scenario-based planning does not capture the complexity of cascading failures.”
The workshop opened by framing the resilience challenge, including discussions of resilience metrics, data integration, system interdependencies, and successful DFW initiatives such as weather-sensing networks, surface-traffic forecasting, and airport emergency preparedness exercises. The next day, participants turned to building an airport resilience toolkit, examining the airport as an interconnected system and exploring how human decision-making and organizational structures can affect response and recovery. The final day brought these themes together through discussions of data correlations, resilience platforms, and opportunities for continued research collaboration.
For Medeiros, one of the most important outcomes was identifying the research and operational gaps that must be addressed to build a more comprehensive understanding of airport resilience. “Some notable examples include the need for a comprehensive airport ontology and the recognition of organizational silos as significant barriers to information sharing,” he said.
The workshop concluded with the formation of collaborative pathways for continued work through SPEAR and partnerships with participating airports. The effort reflects a growing emphasis on understanding resilience not as the response to a single threat, but as the ability of complex systems to withstand, adapt to, and recover from a wide range of disruptions. For SENTRY, this work aligns closely with its mission to develop research-driven approaches to protect soft targets and crowded places and strengthen resilience across interconnected environments.
