About Project-21
Project- 21 is a diverse team of experts who bring an incredible array of perspectives to our work on mass atrocities and global security issues. They bring decades of experience, education & training from fields including international archeology, law enforcement investigation & policing, firefighting, emergency management, GIS mapping, strategic economics, law, international humanitarian operations, disaster medicine & response, intelligence operations & analysis, military operations and much more. All of our team have participated in responses to major global events & issues including 9/11, the WTO riots in Seattle and elsewhere, earthquake response in Haiti, national security, and rapid deployment to disasters, conflict zones and more.
Our name derives from our first investigation. 2021 is the centennial year of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Project-21 captures those two dates in one number, representing our desire to look back into the past, to discover the truth and then to use that truth to progress into the future.
Meet The Project-21 Team
George Davis
George Davis is a geospatial intelligence expert, responded to 9/11 with his set of skills to investigate the post-event geophysical stability. His Tulsa 21 pro bono work to date to geo-rectify historic mapping data to current ortho-photograpy for ground-truthing provides a different perspective not otherwise available of how the historic points of interest relate to the present day landscape of the city. He is Vice President of NSION Technologies which has developed an internationally available public safety communications platform.
LtCol. Matt Begert, USMC (ret)
LtCol. Matt Begert, US Marine Corps (ret) consults on matters of operational technology implementation and effectiveness, emergency response, immersion training and operational planning and execution. He has military operational experience and is trained as an anthropologist and investigative writer. He has practical experience in technology development for public safety. Operational leadership, counterinsurgency and intelligence preparation for operations are some focus areas.
Deanna L. Polk RN, MSHS
Deanna L. Polk RN, MSHS has more than twenty years of national and international experience in disaster response as a Clinical Nurse Supervisor for the the Department of Health & Human Services' Disaster Medical Assistance Teams. In 2002, she organized, and designed training for, a 22 person hospital decontamination response team at Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, California. During her career, Ms. Polk has studied and worked on issues including community resilience and interagency collaboration through relationship building, civil-military collaboration for humanitarian assistance and disaster response, archeological excavations, and social justice advocacy.
Bruce Cahan, J.D.
Bruce Cahan, J.D., is an Ashoka Fellow social entrepreneur, president of the nonprofit Urban Logic, a Lecturer at in Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering Department. and an advocate of urban resiliency planning through sustainable resiliency and disaster preparedness. He is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business and the Temple School of Law, with experience both a law practice and banking management. His perspective of combining law, economics and urban resiliency is particularly pertinent to investigating the Tulsa event and designing a path forward. He was one of the early pioneers in leveraging geospatial technologies for urban resiliency and was an emergency responder in the NYC Mayor’s Command Center after 9/11.
Rich Rotanz
Rich Rotanz, is a subject matter expert with extensive experience in operational emergency management and design. A former Chief of FDNY and Commissioner in the NYC Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, he reconstructed and managed that center after 9/11. He has since designed an emergency response graduate degree program and built a research facility for Homeland Security Technology.