APPSEC CA 2017 Panel: Women in Security



Marian Merritt • Deidre Diamond • Kelly FitzGerald • Julie Medero • Chenxi Wang

Marian Merritt
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Lead for Industry Engagement, National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE)

Marian Merritt is the Lead for Industry Engagement for the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Marian has over 18 years of experience working in the cybersecurity industry. She previously was with Symantec Corporation as their Director of Cyber Education and Online Safety Programs. In that role, she created a cybersecurity career program for underserved young adults which launched in 2014. The Symantec Cyber Career Connection continues in partnership with non-profit workforce development organizations in several US locations. Marian attended Boston University’s Questrom School of Business for her undergraduate degree and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Deidre Diamond
CyberSN
Founder and CEO
Deidre Diamond is the Founder and CEO of the national cyber security staffing company CyberSN, the Founder of not-for-profit organization #brainbabe, and a Strategic Board Member of ICMCP. Prior to founding CyberSN.com and #brainbabe, she was the CEO of Percussion Software, the first VP of Sales at Rapid7 (NYSE:RPD) and the VP of Sales for the national technical staffing company Motion Recruitment. Because Diamond herself was hired as an entry-level college graduate and trained to lead technology service organizations and cyber security organizations, she believes the tech community needs to expand its awareness of what it means “to be in tech” and what it means “to be in cyber security.” Diamond desires to achieve a new way of hiring and retaining women in cyber security.

Kelly FitzGerald
Veritas Technologies LLC.
Senior Principal Information Security Analyst
Kelly FitzGerald is a Senior Principal Information Security Analyst managing both the Customer and Supplier Trust Offices at Veritas Technologies LLC. Prior to her work at Veritas, Kelly worked at Symantec and has held positions in the Product Security, Consumer and Enterprise organizations. Kelly’s focus is examining and investigating information security risk and fraud.

Julie Medero
Harvey Mudd College
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Julie Medero, PhD, researches natural language processing, machine learning and educational applications of language technology. Her research integrates ideas from computer science, linguistics, and electrical engineering to develop new applications of natural language processing to the area of literacy education. In particular, she is interested in how we can use signal processing and machine learning to understand which words and sentences are difficult for readers. She uses linguistic features to learn how to automatically reduce the difficulty of a text using machine learning techniques.

Medero is also exploring ways that we can apply computing to encourage more school-aged children to walk and bike to school.

Before pursuing her PhD, Medero worked for 4 years as a research programmer at the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Chenxi Wang
Twistlock
Chief Strategy Officer
San Francisco
Dr. Chenxi Wang is Chief Strategy Officer of Twistlock. She is responsible for corporate strategy and thought leadership. Chenxi built an illustrious career at Forrester Research, Intel Security, and CipherCloud. At Forrester, Chenxi covered mobile, cloud, and enterprise security, and wrote many hard hitting research papers. At Intel Security, she led the ubiquity strategy that spans both hardware and software platforms. Chenxi is the founder of the Equal Respect Initiative promoting gender diversity in the technology industry. She is also the program co-chair for the 2016 Grace Hopper Conference. Chenxi started her career as a faculty member of Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Chenxi is a sought-after public speaker and a trusted advisor for IT executives. She has been quoted/featured by New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, Fox Business News, Bloomberg, Dark Reading, and many trade media outlets. Chenxi holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Virginia. Her Ph.D. thesis received an ACM Samuel Alexander award for excellence in research.

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