Hume Center names three members to its board of advisors
The Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology at Virginia Tech has named three new members to its advisory board: Rodney Joffe, senior vice president at Neustar; Sherri Ramsey, a former executive with the National Security Agency; and Gwyn Whittaker, vice president at LinQuest.
The Hume Center advisory board is made up of intelligence professionals with significant experience in science, technology, and research. The group meets twice per year to provide strategic direction to the center, and ensure the mission of the Hume Center is carried out.
Joffe is a senior vice president and senior technologist at Neustar. His responsibilities include defining and guiding the technical direction of the company’s Neusentry security offering as well as heading the company's cybersecurity initiatives. Joffe has been a sought-after cybersecurity expert who, among other accomplishments, leads the Conficker Working Group to protect the world from the Conficker worm.
Ramsay is currently a senior advisor to CyberPoint International, and is the former director of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service Threat Operations Center where she led discovery and characterization of threats to national security systems, providing situational awareness for those threats, and coordinating actionable information to counter those threats. At the National Security Agency, she also served as a senior leader in the signals intelligence, technology, and information assurance directorates.
Whittaker is the vice president and general manager of LinQuest Corporation’s Mosaic Intelligence Integration group. She founded Mosaic after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, with the mission to bring innovation solutions and senior technologists and strategists to focus on counterterrorist solutions for the intelligence community. She has also provided consulting services to numerous companies, while assembling a team of senior support staff to focus on efforts across multiple programs and agencies in the intelligence community.
“These three exceptional individuals bring a wealth of experience and insight to our advisory board,” said Hume Center Director Charles Clancy. “They join an already established group of leaders in the national security field who provide invaluable contributions to the mission and direction of the Hume Center.”
The Hume Center was founded in 2010 through an endowment from Ted and Karyn Hume.
With support from Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering and Institute for Critical Technologies and Applied Sciences, the Hume Center leads the university’s education and research ecosystem for national security technologies, with an emphasis on communication and computation challenges of the defense and intelligence communities.
Approximately 100 students receive scholarships, fellowships, or research assistantships from the Hume Center each year, and are vectored toward careers working for the federal government or its industrial base.
The center is located both in Blacksburg and National Capital Region at the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington.
Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 240 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.
Written by Christine Callsen.
Hume advisors
Rodney Joffe, Sherri Ramsay, and Gwyn Whittaker have been named to the advisory board of the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology.
