Dr. Peter K. Forster is an associate teaching professor emeritus in the College of IST.
Previously, he served as the Associate Dean for Online and Professional Education and was a member of the graduate faculty. He held a Ph.D. in Political Science (International Relations) and held affiliate status with the School of International Affairs and the Center for Network Centric Cognition and Information Fusion (NC2IF), an IST-based research center.
Dr. Forster’s primary areas of interest were terrorism/counter-terrorism, risk and crisis management, international relations and national security and homeland security. Since 2010, Dr. Forster had been the principal investigator on a grant exploring how broadband technologies may be used to improve law enforcement’s situational awareness of major issues such as human trafficking and was a faculty adviser on an initiative to re-develop the MINDS group crisis management simulation. He was the co-chair of the NATO/OSCE Partnership for Peace Consortium Combating Terrorism Working Group which brought academics and practitioners together to examine the global aspects of terrorism and its impact. Most recently, Forster had helped develop and facilitate a tabletop exercise involving representatives from 40 countries to address the Foreign Terrorist Fighter threat. During his career, Dr. Forster had been involved in security sector reform initiatives including defense institution building in the Caucasus and South-Central Europe as well as consulting on national distance education initiatives in Central Asia and the Caucasus. He was the co-author and contributing author to books on NATO’s military burden sharing and intervention including most recently Multinational Military Intervention, Stephen J. Cimbala & Peter K. Forster and Policy, Strategy & War: The George W. Bush Defense Program, Stephen J. Cimbala ed. He also had published articles on technology and terrorism, homeland security, and American foreign policy and interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus. His current research focus was the evolution of terrorists’ use of online and mobile technologies in a variety of aspects including the development of a tabletop exercise to identify indicators and warnings of foreign terrorist fighter threats.
Dr. Forster taught courses on crisis and risk management, terrorism, the impact of information on 21st century society, war, and conflict, and the international relations of the Middle East. Prior to joining IST, Peter worked in a number of administrative positions with Penn State’s World Campus contributing to the original plan that saw Penn State transition to an online learning environment and subsequently to its strategic development.
