Dignora Castillo-Soto was a Masters student in Cybersecurity at Bay Path University in Massachusetts, working in retail at an Apple store and beginning a summer internship at Pitney Bowes. She did not know that meeting fellow intern Ololade Odunsi would change her life. Odunsi was a recent Trusted CI Scholar and told Castillo-Soto about Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, and its Scholars program (formerly known as the Trusted CI Student program), a partnership with the Sustainable Horizons Institute (SHI). It was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship.
“I went to the NSF Cybersecurity Summit and was struck in particular by the keynote ‘Security and Privacy for Humans’ by Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, Director and Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University,” says Castillo-Soto. “I fell in love with that talk and with the research portion of cybersecurity. I wanted to explore what we are doing wrong and how we can help people be more cybersecure.”
Inspired by the Summit, Odunsi and Dignora founded Verify LLC to increase cybersecurity awareness for small businesses through seminars and workshops.
“You can go to other conferences and feel overwhelmed because of how many people are there, but at the NSF Summit, some professors from Carnegie Mellon University with 25-plus years of experience gathered a few of us students. We ate together and had great discussions,” says Castillo-Soto. “Through those lunches, I learned that what we students have to bring, even though we are newer to that discussion, it’s still valuable.”
In addition to her work with Verify LLC, Castillo-Soto is in her first year of a Masters program in artificial intelligence from Johns Hopkins University, and is the research analyst for the East Hartford Police Department, looking into crime, traffic, and other issues that impact the department. She uses her ethical hacking and cybersecurity skills for a new initiative she is launching within the intelligence unit, and she is helping introduce artificial intelligence to the department.
“I am delegating and learning what skillsets I have,” says Castillo-Soto. “I have also been able to give feedback to my chiefs, who have done policing for over 20 years. It was one of the hardest things I have done, but it was great. And I would not have been able to do that without my experience with Trusted CI.”