About Us

Management Team

O. Sami Saydjari: President and Founder

Mr. O. Sami Saydjari is the founder and President of Cyber Defense Agency. Under his leadership and guidance, Mr. Saydjari has attracted twenty of the nation's top security experts to create a uniquely superb national asset to help defend the country's most important information systems. He provides vision and expertise for building a research and consulting organization that creates effective systematic defenses for high-value systems against aggressive cyber- attack. Mr. Saydjari has over 20 years experience performing and directing information assurance research, including 13 years as a leader at the National Security Agency and three years as a Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) Program Manager of Information Assurance where he created one of the most significant investments in information assurance in the nation's history.

Before founding the Cyber Defense Agency, Mr. Saydjari was a Senior Staff Scientist in SRI International s Computer Science Laboratory, where he was the program leader of the Cyber Defense Research Center (CDRC). Prior to SRI, Mr. Saydjari was the Information Assurance Program Manager for DARPA's Information Systems Office.

Mr. Saydjari is an internationally recognized security expert. He has been featured in various publications and broadcast including a feature on PBS Frontline. He is the "On the Horizon" department editor for IEEE Security and Privacy Journal. He also has the honor of serving on board of directors for two distinguished professional non-profit boards advising government leadership on cyber defense policy: Cyber Conflict Studies Association and Professionals for Cyber Defense.

Mr. Saydjari earned his M.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University. The Director of NSA named Mr. Saydjari an NSA fellow in 1993 and 1994. He has published more than a dozen technical papers in the field of information security and has presented the results of his research at both such as the National Cryptologic Quarterly, the National Computer Security Conference, IEEE Security and Privacy Conference, and the ACM New Security Paradigms Workshop.

For complete list of publications, press here.

Gerald Hamilton: Director ASITC

Gerald Hamilton is Chief Operating Officer of Cyber Defense Agency, LLC (CDA) and is responsible for day-to-day activities. He has an extensive background in military operations and technology development.

He provides day-to-day operations guidance to CDA staff and serves as Director, Advanced System Integration and Test Center (ASITC) located in Reston, Virginia. The ASITC is cleared for classified programs up to TS/SCI level. The center is used for conduct of information system security research and development, experimentation, and independent testing and evaluation of advanced information operations technologies.

Mr. Hamilton has over 19 years of technical program analysis, management, and control experience in military and intelligence community research and development environments. He has managed a wide variety of technology development efforts within DoD with duties ranging from concept and program development to technology transition to operational forces. Mr. Hamilton served in the U.S. Navy for 26 years, achieving the rank of Captain. His principle Navy duties were in submarine operations, including attack submarine command.

Prior to joining CDA, Mr. Hamilton held various management positions at Schafer Corporation working closely with the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency (DARPA) in information assurance and information operations research and development programs. Mr. Hamilton held management and operations positions at User Technology Associates and Cortana Corporation before joining Schafer Corporation.

Mr. Hamilton earned an M.S. Information Systems degree at the Naval Post Graduate School and a B.S. Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. He is a graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Fort McNair, Washington, DC.

Shelby Evans: Program Director

Dan Thomsen: Chief Information Officer & Research Scientist

Dan Thomsen is Chief Information Officer & Research Scientist at Cyber Defense Agency. As such, he plays a key role in implementing security solutions. He has twenty years experience in the security industry specializing in computer security research, security design and software engineering.

Prior to joining CDA, Mr. Thomsen held several security professional positions at Tresys Technology, LLC and Security Computing Corporation. Mr. Thomsen has made significant contributions to the management of security policy, both role-based access control and the high assurance type enforcement mechanism. Mr. Thomsen has also created high assurance multilevel applications, balancing security, functionality and cost to meet the highest levels of assurance.

Mr. Thomsen is a sought after speaker on computer security topics. He has been a featured guest on Minnesota Public Radio for three different shows and has also been on four local television interviews. He has been published in twenty seven different publications in workshops, magazines, book chapters and journals.

Mr. Thomsen has an M.S. in Computer Science, B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from University of Minnesota. Mr Thomsen plays an active role on the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) program committee for ten years. He was ACSAC 2005 and 2006 conference chair and past program chair. He has also been on the program committee for Security Patterns workshop, ESORICS, ACM SIGMAT, and IFIP working 11.3 on database security as well as a senior member of IEEE.

For complete list of publications, press here.

Dr. Carol Muehrcke: Director of Strategic Planning

Dr. Carol Muehrcke is the Director of Strategic Planning for Cyber Defense Agency. She is responsible for helping determine the CDA long- term strategic plan and coordinating those efforts. She has 13 years of experience in security-related product development and assurance.

Prior to CDA, she led commercial software development projects to bring new security technologies to market, including the 3Com Embedded Firewall, where this technology was transferred from the DARPA Autonomic Distributed Firewall (ADF) program. She previously led the assurance effort for major NSA-sponsored development programs for high assurance Guard systems.

Additionally, Dr. Muehrcke has 9 years experience in systems engineering for advanced manufacturing systems at Bell Laboratories. Her specialties include analytic assurance methods and integration with software development, requirements engineering, architecture level trust analysis and project management.

Dr. Muehrcke has a Ph.D., in Mathematics from Rutgers University and an A.B. in Mathematics from Reed College.