Washington — Eight more universities have been named “centers of excellence” by the Department of Homeland Security.

The announcement, which appeared in today’s Federal Register, comes a little over a year after the Department of Homeland Security said it planned to merge three of its existing academic-research centers and create four new centers, to study natural disasters, border security, explosives detection, and maritime security.

The universities chosen to operate the new centers are Jackson State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (natural disasters), the University of Arizona and the University of Texas at El Paso (border security), Northeastern University and the University of Rhode Island (explosives detection), and the University of Hawaii and the Stevens Institute of Technology (maritime security).

The merger of the existing centers, scheduled for 2010, is part of the department’s effort to eliminate overlap in its Centers of Excellence program, which finances homeland-security research by university consortia. The three centers that will be merged — the Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment, the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense, and the National Center for Food Protection and Defense — all conduct research on chemical and biological terrorism. —Kelly Field