Sarah Brown (M.A. ’03) connects the dots from mathematics to a global career in cybersecurity.

Years ago, when Sarah Brown envisioned all the things she might do with a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, chasing bad guys was definitely not one of them. 

“I don’t think I knew exactly what I was going to do,” she explained. “I knew there would be job opportunities. I could aim to be a teacher, perhaps a university professor.”

Instead, Brown’s career path has taken her to the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. For over 15 years, Brown (M.A. ’03, mathematics) has been on the front lines of the global fight against cyber threats. Now based in Delft, Netherlands, she currently works as a senior scientist with the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency), ensuring that NATO’s essential communications systems are protected and resilient to compromise.   

“NATO is an alliance of 30 countries from Europe and North America who consult and cooperate in the area of defense and security, as well as conduct multinational crisis-management operations together,” Brown explained. “It’s essential that NATO’s systems can fully support these activities, including from a cybersecurity perspective.”

It all started with math

As an only child who grew up in Columbia, Maryland, Brown discovered a love of mathematics early on.

“I thought math was exciting from an early age, and this definitely came from my parents,” Brown explained. “My dad was a mathematician, and my mom was a manager in a very heavily mathematical research group supporting the government in Ft. Meade, Maryland. A lot of my parents’ colleagues were mathematicians and I would meet them at different functions.”

From problem-solving to the challenges of algebra, topology and complex analysis, Brown particularly loved the field of pure mathematics. 

“I liked my math classes in school, I enjoyed logical thinking and doing fun little puzzles, I enjoyed the other nerds that were on the math team with me,” Brown explained. “It made sense to me and I thought it was a lot of fun.”

At Oberlin College, Brown majored in mathematics and, at the encouragement of her dad, computer science, too. She studied for six months in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program for U.S. undergraduates and interned during the summers at the National Security Agency. After getting her undergraduate degree, Brown began her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Washington. 

“Coming home”

“The first year of graduate school was tough and I started to think about getting through it with a little more support,” Brown recalled. “Fortunately, I had also been accepted into the mathematics graduate program at the University of Maryland, and after a year in Seattle, it was like coming home.”

During graduate school, Brown worked at Sandia National Laboratories for two summers, where she did research on a type of optimization problem that could be solved using complex simulations called asynchronous parallel pattern search. She also spent a fellowship semester with the National Academy of Sciences, which introduced her to how scientific research and mathematics are used to inform and shape public policy, and she quickly realized that was exactly what she wanted to do.

“I wanted to do a little bit of technical scientific work, but I also want to see the big picture and understand from a business perspective what the priorities in an organization should be and what kinds of mathematical problems or research should be pursued,” Brown said.

After receiving her master’s degree, Brown joined the National Academy of Sciences full time before finding her next career move.

“At some point I came across The MITRE Corporation, and I learned about Federally Funded Research and Development Centers—FFRDCs—which is the model under which MITRE operates,” Brown said. “FFRDCs function as nonprofit, technical experts for the government, with work that involves plenty of technical challenges as well as public policy and strategy.”

MITRE hired Brown in 2004.

“I applied several times to different departments and was ultimately contacted by their information assurance department,” she recalled. “They said, ‘Your math and computer science background is a really good fit, we could definitely use someone like you.’”

Brown had never pictured herself working in this field, but the more she learned about it, the more interested she became.

“I knew about cryptography and the encryption of data from my mathematics studies at Maryland, and computer programming and operating systems, but I didn’t understand the complexities of system security, and cyberthreats until I joined MITRE,” Brown explained. “In my work there, we focused on identity and access management, evaluating product security and how to ensure data confidentiality during communications between systems.”

A big move

While Brown was working at MITRE’s D.C.-area headquarters, her fiancé was offered an opportunity to do research in Amsterdam. Moving to the Netherlands sounded like a great adventure, so Brown started doing some digging.

“I found out MITRE had a scientist working as a liaison to NATO sitting in The Hague,” Brown explained. “I asked my management more about this role and partnership with NATO, and it turned out there was a great opportunity to serve in a similar position.” 

The rest, as they say, is history.

“It was very serendipitous,” she said. “MITRE sent me over for what was supposed to be two years. We got married, packed three suitcases, came overseas and started taking Dutch lessons. We just got up and went.”

That was 2008. By 2013, Brown’s husband had finished his postdoc and settled into a job with a Dutch company, and Brown had gained a great deal of experience in system security from the NATO perspective, with an appreciation for technical collaboration between the U.S. and NATO and the importance of interoperability and coordination between systems and technical teams. Now she was ready for a change, and she found an exciting opportunity with Fox-IT, a well-known Dutch cybersecurity startup.

As principal cybersecurity expert for FoxIT, Brown supported the threat intelligence team, tracking the changing landscape of cybercrime around the world—and threats to banking institutions in particular—providing guidance to help keep customers’ systems safe.

“It was a fascinating experience,” Brown said. “We were doing technical work, collaborating on a daily basis with the banks and trying to understand the latest cybercrime methods, how these complicated attacks were being carried out and what could be done about them.”

Over the next three years, her work involved collaborating with other cybersecurity experts around the world to unravel and disrupt complex cybercriminal schemes that were stealing millions. 

“Many high-profile groups, like GameOver/P2P Zeus, SpyEye and Dridex were coming up with new and never seen before attack techniques that were very effective,” Brown explained. “It takes a big team effort to understand the full picture of what’s going on. We were involved at Fox-IT, but so were a lot of different companies and countries—and in some cases, law enforcement took action. I enjoyed the collaboration in this work, and it was rewarding to be able to make a difference and to be a part of that.” 

“Working for the good guys”

In 2016, Brown returned to NATO, accepting a role as a senior scientist at NCI, the Communications and Information Agency in the NATO Cyber Security Centre. There, she found a welcome change of perspective from her previous work tracking cybercriminals.

“It’s definitely a lot of fun to be kind of a cyber detective, but after some time focused on criminal activities at NATO it felt like, ‘I’m working for the good guys now, focusing on security systems and taking a break from chasing bad guys,’” she said.

Five years later, Brown is a senior scientist with the Communications and Information Agency, which procures, deploys and defends systems for NATO nations and commands, specifically communications, information and cyber systems, intelligence systems and systems. 

“Robust and resilient communications are at the center of our work,” Brown explained. “Security is all about confidentiality, integrity and availability. You want things that need to stay confidential to stay confidential, things that are put into the system should maintain their integrity, they’re not going to get tampered with, and the system’s available and the data is available when you need it.”

This year, Brown focused on updating the agency’s cybersecurity strategy. 

“Our NCI Agency cybersecurity promotes a perspective of resilience,” she said. “That is, we ensure that the work we do is driven, monitored and reported on from a cyber resilience perspective. It’s essential to create a balance between prevention, protection, defense and recovery in a way that manages risks, because realistically, 100% security is not an achievable goal.”

Though Brown never imagined a career in cybersecurity years ago, she loves her work and the mathematics that’s very much a part of it. 

“I don’t have any integrals to solve, which would be nice,” she said, “but in cybersecurity it’s about problem-solving and breaking down complicated problems into logical pieces in the right order. And I think it’s those skills that I still use now more than anything.”

And, after 14 years, the Netherlands feels like home. 

“We arrived with three suitcases, but we now have two girls, ages 10 and 11, and we live in a beautiful little town where we can bike and walk everywhere,” Brown said. “I really enjoy Europe’s healthy work-life balance. People work from 9 to 5 and they’re very focused in those hours, and then at five o’clock they switch the computer off.”

Brown’s work-life balance allows her to spend more quality time with her family, which she hopes will include a lot more math in the future.

“I love the time I have with my girls. As the girls go through school, I look forward to learning with them and encouraging them the way my parents encouraged me,” she said.

Written by Leslie Miller

Read more about the members of our community who have been honored recently for their outstanding contributions to the university and the field of mathematics.

Faculty

Raymond Johnson is elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society

Small Area Estimation (SAE) Award Committee selected Partha Lahiri for the 2020 SAE Award.

Eitan Tadmor recives the 2022 AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics

Rodrigo Treviño recieves the NSF Career Award

Dilip Madan Named IAQF/Northfield Financial Engineer of the Year (AMSC)

Undergraduate Students

Naveen Raman recieves the 2021-2022 Merrill Presidential Scholar

Lekha Tantry (B.S. ’20; M.Ed. ’21) taught Algebra II virtually while completing the teaching certificate program.

Teaching Algebra II virtually to more than 80 high school students in the middle of a pandemic sounded daunting to Lekha Tantry (B.S. ’20, mathematics; M.Ed. ’21) at first, especially because she was simultaneously completing her master’s certification program at the University of Maryland. But because of her experience with Terrapin Teachers, she felt equipped to take on the challenge.Lekha Tantry. Photo courtesy of same.

Starting her freshman year, Tantry took education courses through Terrapin Teachers, a joint program between UMD’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences and College of Education. Terrapin Teachers provides science and math majors with two pathways to teaching certification—completing a double major in a STEM field plus secondary education with certification in four years or completing a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field and a master’s degree certification program in five years. Under the guidance of highly experienced mentors, students receive early immersive field experiences in local public schools.

Read the rest of this article following this link: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/4837

First class of machine learning and data science professional master’s students graduates from UMD’s Science Academy in May 2021

The University of Maryland’s Science Academy will celebrate its first cohort of students graduating with professional master’s degrees in machine learning and data science at the Spring 2021 Commencement ceremony. The Science Academy, which launched in 2019, offers graduate programs designed specifically for working professionals.

“The Science Academy did exactly what I was hoping for,” said one of the graduates, Adam Morra (B.S. ’17, mechanical engineering; M.P.S. ’21, machine learning). “I was an entry-level data scientist and machine learning engineer, and I was looking to take my career to the next level.”

When he enrolled in the machine learning program in 2019, Morra was an analytics and cognitive consultant. But last year, he was laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the skills he was learning in his courses, Morra quickly got a new job.

“During the master's program, I transitioned to a lead machine learning engineer position at a small consulting company where I was the main machine learning resource at my company, which was awesome,” he said.

Then, in February 2021, he took on a new role at the startup Domusys, where he is doing both mechanical engineering and machine learning.

“It's always been my dream to work for a startup and to apply machine learning,” Morra said. “This master’s program opened so many doors for me and it led to my dream job.”

One of Morra’s classmates, Manik Bali (M.P.S. ’21, machine learning), joined the Science Academy program to increase his skills and work more efficiently at his job. He’s a senior faculty specialist at UMD’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and the deputy director of the Global Space-based Inter-Calibration System (GSICS) coordination center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Bali also took advantage of the tuition remission offered through his employment at UMD and part of his costs were covered through a NOAA and Joint Polar Satellite System grant.

“I signed up for the Science Academy because the courses offered a new perspective at solving complex data-driven problems,” Bali said. “If applied to my field of work, which is satellite Earth observation, climate studies, scientific programming and collaborative development, it can provide a paradigm shift in the manner in which these crucial problems are handled using classical techniques.”

At NOAA, Bali coordinates monitoring of weather satellites from over 15 space agencies across the world. New methods of data analytics on the cloud that he developed from ideas picked up from the Science Academy have led to new tools in a collaborative environment that are being used worldwide. 

For instance, Manik is using a natural language processing-based machine learning technique to develop a tool that can extract information about weather satellites from authentic documents and place it on webpages in a format agreed upon by members of the satellite agencies. This would dramatically reduce the amount of staff time required to do the job now.

Using the knowledge he gained in his courses, Manik also developed a high-impact, cloud-based tool that can parse large documents, like meeting minutes from international meetings, and extract relevant summaries and action items and place them on the web. This tool is now used by GSICS satellite agencies worldwide. 

“Tools like the one I developed have dramatically reduced the costs of coordination and have helped in enhancing a collaborative ecosystem within the GSICS community,” Bali said.

One of the most appealing aspects of the Science Academy for both Morra and Bali is that they were able to continue working while pursuing their master’s degrees. 

“The program was designed for working professionals and they did a great job striking the right education and workload balance for working professionals,” Bali said.

When the data science and machine learning programs began in 2019, all of the courses were held in the evening on UMD’s College Park campus. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the courses went online but still kept their evening hours.

“The flexibility of being in a program where you can manage your work-life balance and still continue your education is what made me choose this program over other master's programs,” Morra said. “When searching for programs, everything I found was either online and designed for working professionals, or in-person and full-time. I really wanted the in-person experience and I was glad to get that with the Science Academy.”

As the Science Academy continues to grow, Bali and Morra are confident the program will continue to improve. Both have been given opportunities to offer their thoughts to help shape the program for the future.

“Amy Chester, the director of the Science Academy, and others who are coordinating the classes always ask for feedback and what they can do even better going forward,” Bali said. “I’m sure they will use that information to help the next batch of students.”

With their positive experiences coupled with the program’s goal to become even better going forward, both graduates confidently recommend the Science Academy to others. Morra has already recommended it to others, and Bali thinks it would be valuable for many working professionals.

“The knowledge that I’ve gained has been of immense use to me in my work,” Bali said, “and I’m sure it would be the same for others, too, whether in science or in management.”

Written by Chelsea Torres

Read more about the members of our community who have been honored recently for their outstanding contributions to the university and the field of mathematics.

Faculty

Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching: Lawerence Washington

Sloan Research Fellowship: Tamas Darvas

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Class of 2021 Fellows: Eitan Tadmor

Graduate Students

SIAM Certificate of Recognition: Kayla Davie

Women of Influence Award: Sarah Burnett

CMNS Board of Visitors Outstanding Graduate Student : Duncan McElfresh

Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate Researchers of the Year: Tyler Hoffman and Jesse Matthews

National Science Foudation Graduate Research Fellowship: Tyler Hoffman, John Lathrop, and Jesse Matthews

Goldwater Scholar: Naveen Raman

Alumni

Victor De Oliveira (PhD 1997) elected Fellow of American Statistical Association

Q&A with the Department of Mathematics’ Antoine Mellet and Susan Mazzullo on virtual teaching

When the University of Maryland suddenly went virtual last March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, departments had to make a quick shift from in-person to online learning. The Department of Mathematics was no exception. Department Chair Doron Levy and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies Antoine Mellet took swift action to create a smooth transition for their instructors in a time full of chaos. Together, Levy and Mellet transferred 366 classes, 110 instructors and over 8,000 students to online learning. We spoke with Mellet and Lecturer Susan Mazzullo to learn about their experiences transitioning to online teaching, and what they will bring with them when the department resumes in-person classes in the fall.

How did you feel when you learned that classes were going online?

AM: It was intimidating having to handle such a big undertaking. I was not teaching at that time, but I was tapped to supervise the transition from in-person to online learning along with Chair Doron Levy. Doron was a very crucial force in getting this done. We actually started planning for the shift a few weeks before the campus went virtual. Doron and I were following the news stories about the coronavirus and thought that this might be something we would have to do. 

SM: I have taught online before, and in some of my classes I have done zoom “work” session classes and have found them very useful, but not to see the students in person at all was going to be tough. I just miss them terribly. There's something about being with the students in class and seeing their facial expressions and interacting in person. However, because we have tools like Zoom it cushioned the blow. You can ask the students to turn on their videos in Zoom if they want to, so you can see them and talk to them before class. Things like that helped me find new ways to engage with my students and made the shift a bit easier.

What was the transition from in-person to virtual teaching like?

AM: We spent the week of spring break and the week after, when classes were cancelled, making sure that all of the instructors were comfortable with teaching online. We formed a small committee of five of the more tech-savvy instructors and we met almost every day during the two weeks to create tutorials. We also held a meeting with all of the instructors to manage expectations. I think the initial reaction of a lot of my colleagues was that they were nervous about the idea of teaching online. We let everyone know that we didn’t expect anyone to become a master at online teaching overnight. 

SM: Our chair and associate chair, Doron and Antoine, facilitated the transition with such care and diligence, we were amazingly prepared for such a dramatic change in course dilivery. They great care with giving us all of the information and equipment needed to hold our classes online. I’ve done distance learning before, so I was familiar with the technology, but putting everything online was so much more work than anticipated, so having information and assistance available was so helpful. They created an online community for the lecturers to talk with one another, share our tips and techniques for online learning, and just help each other out. The transition was really quite a beautiful experience, and everything just came together so nicely. With such a horrible, horrendous situation, for beauty to come out of it is amazing.

What was the biggest challenge?

AM: The main challenge that we ran into was lack of student engagement and low attendance. Pre-pandemic, attendance wasn’t a huge issue, and it was strong at the start of virtual learning but began to drop off toward the end of the semester. Since attendance is important for student learning and making sure they are getting all that they can from the class, we set some guidelines regarding attendance by requiring every course to have one live meeting every week. That helped increase attendance in many of the cases. At the start of the fall semester, attendance wasn’t a major problem anymore.

Another big challenge for us was exams. In a normal classroom setting, we would hold exams in person with no notes and no textbook. Once we started virtual learning, we had to accept that students would likely look to their books for assistance. For smaller classes, we started doing live exams on Zoom, which worked really well. It is much harder for students to go through their textbooks to find answers when you can see them through their cameras. For larger classes, many exams were timed. Students may have been able to look up some answers in their book or online, but with the time given, they would not have been able to do that for all of them.

SM: Not being able to see the students in person is very difficult. When you’re teaching in person, you can look at a student and kind of tell when they’re not getting something and then find a way to explain it better to them. Also, students can come up to you after class and ask questions, but on Zoom it’s just different. 

I do office hours and test reviews via Zoom where I can talk with and connect with students. But the most helpful thing has been telling the students at least once a week that they can turn their cameras on so we can say hello and see each other’s faces. A lot of students will participate, and some might even have their hair all crumpled, still in their pajamas, but they were there and participating—I love it. It helped bring back the human element of teaching and I could feel the personality of each student and the class as a whole. 

Is there anything from online teaching during the pandemic that you will carry over when in-person math classes resume?

AM: I think that before 2020, technology was slowly making its way into math classrooms. The pandemic has accelerated this movement and some of these tools will stay with us. For example, the collection of homework assignments online, which allows us to get the homework straight from the students to the grader, will likely be used post-pandemic. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some instructors occasionally post short videos for students to watch before or after class. These takeaways from the pandemic will allow us to all become more dynamic instructors going forward. But I think that these semesters of online teaching made it clear that, for most instructors and most students, in-person classes and the connections that are made in them are very valuable and not easily replaced.

SM: I am going to love seeing the students in person! I have missed the in-class contact that builds relationships. This year has encouraged me to continue what I had been doing before the pandemic, but with more, if not all, of my classes. Before the pandemic, I would do an online workshop class about once a week or once every other week for my upper-level classes. When I started these workshops, I found that students who did not like to engage in person seemed to engage more online. I have a feeling that if I have online workshops and in-person classes for all of my courses, then I will be able to actively engage a greater number of students overall. The more ways I am able to engage my students and excite them about math, the better. I am excited to test my theory!