Dr. Chris Cannizzaro
Department of Homeland Security
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

Dr. Chris Cannizzaro started his career in policy when he came to Washington in 2008 as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. He intended to serve only one year at the Department of State’s Office of Space and Advanced Technology, before returning to his faculty position at Tufts University. Well, one year, became two – and two became sixteen and counting! In this presentation, he will discuss his decision to enter the policy world and his path from the State Department to the White House, his brief stint outside of government at a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, and his current position at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where he is leading efforts to assess risk to space systems and the provision of space-based services.

BIO: Dr. Chris Cannizzaro leads the Space Systems and Services branch within CISA’s National Risk Management Agency. His branch seeks to identify, assess, and mitigate risk to space systems and from dependencies on space-based services such as GPS, communications, and Earth observations. His branch works across the critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, and space communities to build bridges and share essential information. Before joining CISA, he served as a research staff member at IDA’s Science and Technology Policy Institute and as the Director for Critical Infrastructure at the White House National Security Council. Chris also spent more than a decade at the Department of State’s Office of Space and Advanced Technology, working on a range of emerging technology and space policy issues, including space exploration, space sustainability, and resilience of ground- and space-based assets. Prior to that, he served as a research professor at Tufts University, a postdoctoral associate at MIT, and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Milan. He has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland.