Dr. Andy Ozment is the Assistant Secretary of the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications (CS&C) within the National Protections and Programs Directorate (NPPD) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this role, Dr. Ozment oversees a budget of almost $930 million and leads a Federal employee workforce charged with enhancing the security, resilience, and reliability of the Nation’s cyber and communications infrastructure.

Dr. Ozment has worked in the cybersecurity field as a programmer, operator, researcher, policymaker, and executive. Prior to joining DHS, he served at the White House as the President’s Senior Director for Cybersecurity where he led a team that developed national policy and coordinated federal cybersecurity efforts in the areas of critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity legislation, executive branch security, privacy and civil liberties, information sharing, and incident response.

Dr. Ozment was responsible for the development and the implementation of President Obama’s Executive Order (EO) 13636 on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. The EO led to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework and resulted in a significant increase in threat information sharing from the government to the private sector. Dr. Ozment also established the Cross Agency Priority (CAP) goal for cybersecurity and led the development of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), a signature initiative by the Administration to improve security and privacy across the Internet.

Prior to joining the White House, Dr. Ozment led an operational security group at DHS that oversaw compliance, metrics, and security authorization for the department’s Chief Information Security Officer. Previously, Dr. Ozment served in cybersecurity roles with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, National Security Agency, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Merrill Lynch, and Nortel Networks.

In his academic career, Dr. Ozment worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he published 11 refereed academic publications on software vulnerabilities, DNS and HTTP security, the economics of cybersecurity, and security usability.

Dr. Ozment earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. While studying in the United Kingdom on a Marshall Scholarship, he earned a Master of Science degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.