Laurin Buchanan, Principal Investigator for Secure Decisions and an industry leader in cyber security education, was invited to speak at the 2018 CyberUSA Conference on January 30^th, in San Antonio, Texas. Ms. Buchanan will be part of a panel exploring new advancements in cyber security education programs and practices. Moderated by Loyce Pailen, of the University of Maryland, Ms. Buchanan will be joined on the panel by Akhtar Lodgher of Texas A&M University’s Computing and Cyber Security department, and Matt Loeb, CEO of ISACA.

The panel will discuss challenges facing cyber security education at all levels, from K12 students, higher education and the modern workforce. Also up for consideration are the gaps that still exist in cyber security education efforts. Each panelist will provide insight from their own practice area about what can be achieved through both short term and long term efforts across the spectrum of cyber security education programs.

The CyberUSA Conference is an annual one-day event gathering CyberUSA affiliates to discuss advances in various aspects of the cyber security industry. The event is open to cyber security operators, educators, students, and practitioners across academia, government, and commercial industry. The event will take place January 30^th, in San Antonio, Texas. You can learn more about the event and register for it here.

Laurin Buchanan is a Certified Information Security Systems Professional, and Principal Investigator with the Secure Decisions division of Applied Visions, Inc. She spent two decades managing IT operations and information security in the corporate sector, most recently for a Fortune 1000 company. She now uses that operational background to lead R&D efforts for new and novel solutions to improve the cybersecurity decision making by humans in the loop, from automating decision support for network security policy management, to modeling and automatically mapping dependencies between missions, users, and cyber assets. Most recently she has worked to understand the decision processes of Computer Network Defense analysts and the use of visualizations to enhance those decisions, and to develop Comic-BEE, a novel, interactive approach for cybersecurity education and evaluation using interactive webcomics that are engaging for all age and expertise levels.