During the recent L.A. area wildfires, Nicholas Taxera, who is studying public administration, worked as an AmeriCorps fellow, supporting the YMCA’s donation and volunteer efforts. He saw firsthand how a lack of communication between the government, private organizations, and the military hurt the response.

“During that experience, I identified there’s truly not a lack of resources in our community. There is just a lack of coordination,” Taxera said.

The Price School of Public Policy launched the Center on National Defense and Public Safety on August 6, to bring the public, private and nonprofit sectors — along with the military — into one room to prepare for future disasters.

Frank Zerunyan, who serves as director of the new center, said it could improve responses to wildfires — such as those in Pacific Palisades and Altadena — or an earthquake by combining various emergency plans.

Zerunyan said every jurisdiction —  police, fire departments and the military — has its own emergency plan for an earthquake, fire or other disaster. These individual plans, however, have no connection to one another, he said.

“The goal of the center is to create, for the first time, a connection between those plans, understanding full well that emergencies do not stop at the border of a jurisdiction,” he said.

Zerunyan said that the center will feature an educational component and a research component. For the educational aspect, the center aims to bring together local leaders, military leaders from the USC Shield Program and law enforcement officials from the former Safe Communities Institute to consolidate assets related to national defense or public safety.

The USC Shield Program is a joint endeavor between Price and Viterbi that brings together voices from the military, government and innovation communities to study national security. The Safe Communities Institute was a Price program aimed at educating law enforcement officials that now falls under the purview of the Center on National Defense and Public Safety.

The center will also give interested ROTC students and anyone involved in its research project lessons in public administration, public policy, urban planning, health administration and real estate development at Price — all areas Zerunyan said are essential to creating a comprehensive emergency management plan.

Zerunyan, who also serves as director of USC’s ROTC program, said he hopes that the educational components offered through the center will prepare ROTC graduates for life in the military.

Luke Donahoe, a sophomore in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, said he is thankful for the educational opportunities available at Price to students training for military service.

“It gives officers the chance to get a master’s degree in a field that they might find applicable to their career as naval officers and marine officers,” Donahoe said.

The center’s research component revolves around a novel project to create a comprehensive, multi-jurisdictional emergency management plan.

“The ultimate goal is to create the prototype of that emergency management plan using L.A. as the laboratory,” said Zerunyan. “This thing that we do as a prototype should be able to scale across the United States and, for that matter, into our NATO allies.”

The new center has already created a research team of 12 master’s students, led by Taxera and James Lee, both of whom are graduate students studying in Price.

Lee, who is studying public policy, said his experience working as a staff operations planner in the Navy often involved civilian-military relation efforts. He said that comprehensive solutions rely on “bridging relationships” between the civilian components and the military’s capabilities.

“I understand the most critical part of it, which, in my opinion, is the human part and navigating through the human sensitivities when figuring out the way through the bureaucracy,” Lee said.

Once the group gets into the later stages of the research, Zerunyan said he hopes to create opportunities for undergraduate internships in the project, specifically for ROTC students.

“I probably would involve some of the ROTC students from each branch to be involved in the internship programs so that they’re able to bring in that civil-military relations and collaboration understanding to their skill set,” he said.

Donahoe said he was interested in the internship opportunities the new center could provide for students like him.

“Getting an internship gives me the opportunity to widen my stance,” Donahoe said. “If public policy is something that I’m interested in, especially in a career like the military, I think that would give me a dramatic advantage as opposed to a lot of other ROTC students across the nation.”

As the center continues on its project to create a new emergency plan prototype, Zerunyan said he hopes to create an endowment for the center so that its efforts can continue as new students join and older students graduate.