Tara O'Toole is an American physician who served as the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology from 2009 to 2013.
In 2006, she was appointed to the board of the Google Foundation's International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection.
She was a principal author and producer of Dark Winter (2001) and Atlantic Storm[2] (2005), both of which simulated a covert outbreak of smallpox in the United States.
Many experts applauded these exercises for publicizing the country's surprising vulnerabilities, including a vaccine shortage.
[3] Critics charged that these exercises exaggerated the bioterror threat, leading to "an unnecessary increase in the number of research labs.