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The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon made historical demands on our rapid-response emergency systems. While the devastation was on a scale rarely witnessed, the weaknesses in the emergency-response system that emerged, as events unfolded, are endemic to emergency-response systems across the world. A critical shortcoming was the lack of an integrated, reliable system for sharing data and communication among all of the agencies involved: Three key reports that evaluate emergency response to these events, The McKinsey Report on Fire Department New York Response to the September 11 Terrorist Attack on the World Trade Center (2002), The Arlington County After Action Report on Response to the September 11 Terrorist Attack on the Pentagon (2002), and The Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-5 (2003), all emphasize the urgent need to develop a more principled approach in integrating the emergency response communitys social and technological infrastructures. Today, advances in information technology (IT), changes in organizational structures, and increasingly complex relationships among emergency service entities have ushered in a period of unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The practical challenges confronting emergency personnel pose fundamental questions of interest to social scientists who investigate how temporary, flexible, ad hoc human networks form and how decisions get made in the process. These practical challenges also pose equally fundamental questions for engineers and computer scientists interested in developing tools to facilitate the dynamic formation of emergency response networks, to enhance situation awareness, and to provide decision-making support among multi-agency personnel in mobile and distributed teams. Our challenge as social scientists is to enable rapidly organized, networked, virtual, inter-agency emergency response teams capable of adapting to the constantly shifting demands of a more densely populated, interconnected and, as a consequence, more vulnerable society. Our opportunity is that IT innovations have enabled the imagineering of scale-free, adaptive, and decentralized socio-technical networks wherein human practices and technological affordances negotiate an evolving structural equilibrium. Our objective therefore is to design, study, validate, deploy and test highly effective socio-technical emergency response networks.Our premise is that a socio-technical system that would best respond to the challenges faced by emergency personnel must ensure that its multi-layered components - individuals, organizations, procedures, cultural norms, databases, middleware, operating systems,networking protocols, intelligent computational aids, and hardware devices - are aligned into ad hoc socio-technical networks that can be optimized, validated, and reconfigured on the fly. Our approach integrates cutting-edge theories and tools from computer science, engineering, and the social sciences to develop, deploy, and test such systems.