The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) lab has increasingly become a more prominent component of the EADP program.  The lab serves as a state-of-the-art EOC providing students with practical, hands-on experience with emergency management technologies.  The EOC lab is utilized for several EAPD undergraduate classes and MPA graduate courses.  The EOC Design and Operations course is now a core class taking place in the EOC lab for EADP majors in which students are exposed to disaster response decision-support technologies. 

Disaster Exercise Design is offered as an elective with students designing functional exercises for the following scenarios; natural hazard, technological hazard, terrorist incident and pandemic.  The EOC lab is also utilized for the Hurricane Preparedness and Operations course in which students have the opportunity to utilize programs such as HurrEvac, HurrTrack and Slosh modeling.  The Technology in Emergency Management course provides EADP students with hands-on experience in utilizing GIS in emergency management applications.  At the graduate level, students in the MPA program can take Administrative Research Methods I and Introduction to GIS for Public Administrators in the EOC lab.

The EOC lab draws attention at home and abroad.  Recent visitors have included FEMA officials including Deputy Administrator Richard Serino, a group of scholars from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, emergency management officials from Sweden, and scholars from Canada and New Zealand.  As we move forward, we will continue to explore opportunities for partnering with non-UNT groups in developing and utilizing the EOC lab.