Speakers

Marisol Cruz Cain is a Director in GAO’s Information and Cybersecurity team. She oversees work on federal cybersecurity and privacy issues, including specific agencies’ ability to protect privacy, sensitive data, and the computing infrastructure. In addition, she is a Diversity Champion participating in efforts to increase diversity at GAO and facilitating multiple Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion courses in the Learning Center. 

Marisol joined GAO in 2005. She has led audits on government-wide cybersecurity, privacy, and information management issues, including reviews of the efficiency of federal privacy programs, the implementation of cybersecurity risk management practices, and the transition to electronic records. She has also led reviews of cybersecurity and IT management/operations at specific agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Federal Student Aid. 

Marisol earned a master’s degree in public administration from University at Albany. Marisol has earned a master’s degree in information security from University of Maryland Global Campus. Marisol earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

At the United States (U.S.) Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Mr. Sanjeev “Sonny” Bhagowalia currently holds the Senior Executive Service position of Assistant Commissioner (AC), Office of Information and Technology (OIT) and CBP Chief Information Officer (CIO).

Mr. Bhagowalia has over 39 years of senior technical, managerial, and executive leadership experience in private industry, the U.S. Government, and state government.  Mr. Bhagowalia has spent over 22 of those years in senior executive capacity, including over 21 years as a member of the Senior Executive Service (SES), one year as a Senior Level (SL) in the Federal Government, and three years as a Senior Executive in State Government.  He has served in key CIO leadership roles at five government agencies: Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, State of Hawaii, U.S. Department of Treasury and CBP, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  He also served in Chief Executive Officer (CXO) roles as a Deputy Associate Administrator for Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at General Services Administration, and as a Program Management Executive/Assistant Director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice.  Mr. Bhagowalia also served for 14 years in Industry at Boeing, a Fortune 30 company, ultimately serving for five years in senior technical leadership roles as a Chief Engineer/Manager and as an honorary Senior Principal Engineer in the Boeing Company. 

He has used his knowledge of IT/Information Resource Management (IRM), cybersecurity, and business process re-engineering to transform and secure organizations, and has helped the Federal CIO/CTO to roll out foundational White House Government-wide initiatives such as Open Data, Federal Cloud, FedRAMP and Federal Data Center Consolidation.

Mr. Bhagowalia has received 45 awards from the U.S. Government and Industry, including a rare distinction of two Presidential Rank Awards for Meritorious Executive Service; three Federal 100 Awards; three Golden Gov Executive of the Year awards in a row; Wash100; State Gov Executive of the Year; Government CIO of the Year; Government Innovator of the Year; NASA Silver Snoopy; NASA Award of Merit; and the White House Champion of Change. He led the team that won the Chief Information Officer 100 award for data.gov; and “Best of the Web” State Portal award from Center for Digital Government (CDG) for Hawaii.gov. He was inducted into the Boeing Technical Excellence Fellowship Program in 2014, recognizing the top one percent of engineers and scientists in the Boeing Company; the 2014 Federal Enterprise Architecture Certification Institute Hall of Fame; and the 2015 National Defense University IRM College Hall of Fame.

Mr. Bhagowalia has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) and a Master of Science (MS) Degree in EE from Louisiana State University, and an MS in IRM from Syracuse University. He is also a twice-distinguished graduate from the National Defense University, U.S. Department of Defense, with an IRM Diploma and Federal CIO Certificate.

Alice is an Assistant Bureau Chief at the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau where she is responsible for privacy, data security, and cybersecurity matters. Alice served nearly a decade at the U.S. Department of Justice focusing on telecom-related national security investigations and intellectual property litigation. She was also detailed to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate privacy and data security practices of foreign-owned entities. Alice has received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service and the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Furthering the Interests of U.S. National Security.

Frank Catucci is a global application security technical leader with over 20 years of experience, designing scalable application security specific architecture, partnering with cross-functional engineering and product teams. Frank is a past OWASP Chapter President and contributor to the OWASP bug bounty initiative and most recently was the Head of Application & Product Security at Data Robot. Prior to that role, Frank was the Sr. Director of Application Security & DevSecOps and Security Researcher at Gartner, and was also the Director of Application Security for Qualys.

Erin supports Google Cloud’s government clients throughout their cloud transformation journeys and focuses on cybersecurity, regulatory and privacy compliance, risk management, and resilience.

Before joining Google, Erin was SVP at Mandiant working with customers and partners to modernize cyber security and defense. Prior to that role, Erin was a Senior Executive leader in the FBI orchestrating world-wide cyber operations countering nation state adversaries. She, also, led several of the FBI’s digital transformations. Erin was the second Director of the U.S. Government’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center at ODNI and served as the advisory board’s chair over the seven US federal cyber centers. Over her extensive career, Erin developed national security operations, government strategies, and policies to counter threats from nation-state actors, criminals, and terrorists. Erin is an attorney and enjoys her board advisory roles. 

Jim Coyle is the U.S. Public Sector CTO at Lookout, utilizing his 20+ years of front line cyber knowledge and expertise to help close the security gap many government agencies and organizations face today. A cyber security industry thought leader exploring geo-political cyber related issues, the latest threats and defense strategies, as well as industry trends providing insights through his career. Jim is currently responsible for leading the charge for the greater US Public Sector community, to re-design and revolutionize cyber security programs of customers to battle today’s threats.

While at Lookout, Jim’s responsibilities included leading and building out the strategy for Lookout’s threat intelligence program, leading the channel engineering team, and developing go to market strategies for the greater U.S. Public Sector team. Prior to joining Lookout, Jim helped build a highly successful U.S. Public Sector business at FireEye through leading high performing partnerships using intelligence learned from the front lines of cyberwarfare.

Jim previously was a specialist in securing network traffic in both terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments and was one of the pioneers in creating a double encryption solution for classified data over wireless communication (CSfC), which received approval by the NS Building and designing complex multi-domain networks for both military and commercial customers provided a strong background in solving customer business and technology challenges with cutting edge solutions. Jim’s experience has ranged from a Security Manager on system response teams, Unix and Oracle security and administration to designing security policies for a Fortune 500 hospitality company.

Jessie Bur is Nextgov/FCW's executive editor. She has been covering technology and government for the past eight years and graduated from James Madison University.