O. Sami Saydjari Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Cyber Defense Agency
![O.-Sami-Saydjari-200x200 O.-Sami-Saydjari-200x200](https://www.aiaa.org/images/default-source/content/headshots/o--sami-saydjari-200x200.png?sfvrsn=a4a9ee68_2)
Mr. O. Sami Saydjariis the founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Cyber Defense Agency, a strategic cybersecurity consulting company. His vision and leadership create and apply effective systematic assessments and defenses for high-value systems against aggressive cyber-attack. He is an internationally recognized expert in strategic cybersecurity issues and a key innovator in the field, and the author of the Engineering Trustworthy Systems (McGraw-Hill, 2018). Mr. Saydjari teaches graduate Cybersecurity Systems Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Saydjari has 37 years of experience directing cybersecurity initiatives, including 13 years leading at the National Security Agency (NSA) and 3 years creating the future of cybersecurity at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). His expertise includes: risk assessment, cybersecurity architecture, high-assurance operating systems, red teaming, network security, public-key infrastructures, and securing space exploration systems. He co-invented one of the first strategic, cybersecurity risk-management approaches and pioneered cybersecurity system engineering.