Top cybersecurity administrators include key officials in government agencies and executives in leading private sector companies.

J.P. Auffret is director, Research Partnerships in the Costello College of Business and director, Center for Assurance Research and Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computing at George Mason University, USA.

Auffret is also co-founder and current president of the International Academy of CIO (IAC), an NGO headquartered in Tokyo, Japan with the objectives of fostering the development of CIO and IT executive leadership education and institutions; and the application of emerging technologies to major challenges including healthcare, ageing societies and natural disasters.

Source: webpage

Kenneth S. Ball, PhD, PE is Dean of the College of Engineering and Computing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Since arriving at Mason in 2012, Ball has led the college through extensive growth and rapid change increasing research awards and expenditures, expanding enrollment, and establishing several first-of-their-kind programs to attract future generations of engineering and computing professionals.  

Under Ball’s leadership, the college’s ranking and reputation have improved. In the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings of our nation’s Best Graduate Schools, the college placed in the top 100 among public universities. Ball helped the college keep pace with its strong growth in student enrollment, advocating for more faculty and staff. He led a proactive response to the needs of our students, placing a high priority on ensuring the college has the faculty to maintain student-faculty ratios to allow vigorous levels of student-faculty interaction and mentoring, to limit the number of large-enrollment classes, and to be able to offer all of the courses that students need to graduate, including elective courses. These efforts keep diversity and inclusion at the forefront by expanding access and inclusion.

Source: webpage

Paulo Costa has applied his significant experience as a fighter pilot to a career specializing in the field of electronic warfare and flight safety, which in conjunction with his research on probabilistic reasoning has led to applications in cyber and transportation security, heterogeneous data fusion, and decision support systems in healthcare, defense, and other areas. These topics are at the core of his classroom activities at both graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as his research path. Costa leads the research of graduate-level students in understanding security objectives and verification protocols, bringing in the science of probabilistic reasoning and challenging PhD-level candidates to consider theory and methods for building computationally efficient software agents that reason, act, and learn in environments characterized by noisy and chaotic traffic.

Costa is a key researcher in the field of probabilistic ontologies and has developed innovative applications and extensions that aid in the fight against cyber-warfare. In addition to his Mason assignments as Chair of the Cyber Security Engineering Department and Director of the C5I Center, Dr. Costa is Vice President for Securing Automation and Supply Chain Security (cymanii.org). He is a former President and current elected member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Information Fusion (isif.org), as well as an IEEE Senior Member (SM13).

Degrees

• PhD, Information Technology, George Mason University
• MS, Systems Engineering, George Mason University
• BS, Engineering, Brazilian Air Force Academy

Source: CEC Page

A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, Cummings was one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots. She is now the director of Mason’s Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC) and a professor at George Mason University. She holds faculty appointments in the Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science departments. She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow and recently served as the senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Cummings received her BS in Mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1988, her MS in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004.

Source: GMU webpage

Anup Ghosh is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at ThreatMate. Prior to Threatmate, Ghosh was CEO of Fidelis Cybersecurity. An established cybersecurity leader, Ghosh brings extensive senior leadership experience, successfully managing and expanding markets for start-ups and mature cybersecurity companies. Mr. Ghosh’s expertise has been featured on Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, Federal Times, Market Watch, and USA Today. Ghosh’s charter is to establish Fidelis as the go-to partner for high fidelity adversarial detection and response solutions in the Global 2000 and Government segments.

Ghosh was also managing director and global platforms lead at Accenture Security, where he led strategic technology investments that scaled Accenture Security’s rapid growth in the managed security services business. Previously Ghosh founded and ran Invincea, Inc., a Virginia-based machine learning cybersecurity company, through its acquisition by Sophos in March 2017.

Prior to founding Invincea, he was Chief Scientist for the GMU Center for Secure Information Systems and a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he created and managed an extensive portfolio of cybersecurity programs for the US Government DOD and Intelligence Community.