User:Webjedi

Amélie Erin Koran is a information security professional living in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. She's a graduate of Frederick High School in Frederick, Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She developed the Star Wars Multimedia Archive in 1993 as an undergraduate and then started SoundtrackNet in 1996 upon graduating the university. She has worked for Xerox as a user interface designer, the American Chemical Society as a webmaster, Stan Lee Media, Namesafe, Inc. and Mandiant as an IT Manager, the World Bank and CERT/CC as a computer security specialist, enterprise security architect for the United States Department of the Interior, senior architect for enterprise architecture and technology strategy for The Walt Disney Company, and most recently the United States Department of the Treasury. She was most recently employed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services - Office of the Inspector General as the Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer. After leaving Federal service, she became a Senior Technology Advocate for Splunk, but is now the Director of External Technology Partnerships for Electronic Arts, Inc..

Early Years
Amélie was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1975 to a mother who was graduate of Kutztown University in media arts and advertising, and a father who was a graduate of Lehigh University in chemistry, who at the time was pursuing his doctorate degree in analytical chemistry at the University of Cincinnati.

Educational Career
Because of family turmoil, Amélie had spent her primary and secondary educational years in a wide variety of locations and schools. In her youth, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, she attended pre-school and kindergarten at Faith Tabernacle, but then entered the Lycoming County public school system by attending grade first through third at John J Becht Elementary and fourth grade at Four Mile Elementary, and due to her time in the Gifted and Talented program in the school system (since second grade) took fifth grade math studies while still in fourth grade. Eventually her mom and stepfather moved to Bartonsville, Pennsylvania where she attended the newly opened Pocono Elementary Center for fifth and sixth grades.

Her biological father gained custody of her in 1987 after a protracted legal battle that had lasted since she was in kindergarten, and resumed school for seventh through ninth grades at Bridgetown Junior High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, when she achieved recognition by being chosen for the National Junior Art Society and National Junior Honor Society. Upon her father's promotion to headquarters for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the family moved to Frederick, Maryland where she finished her secondary education at Frederick High School.

Upon graduating with honors, she went on to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, first entering in as an electrical and computer engineering undergrad, but by junior year transferred majors to information and decision systems program, and eventually graduated with a major in social and decision sciences with minors in information and decision systems and engineering studies. While as an undergrad, she worked in the campus computer store and eventually took a job working for the Information Networking Institute as a systems administrator and also worked for a year as a research assistant for the Human Computer Interaction Institute located in the School of Computer Science. Her research included telecommunications policy, wearable computers, public policy, micropayments, and wireless technology.

Professional Career
1990s During her time at Carnegie Mellon University, she was a work study student in for on-campus positions, first within the university computer store as a purchasing clerk. She then started at the Information Networking Institute as a systems administrator for the masters program computer cluster and research facility. She assisted the NetBill program, performed field research for Bell Atlantic and their AirBridge service that secured funding for Wireless Andrew, and supported several of the student research projects.
 * Carnegie Mellon University

Between her sophomore and junior years in 1995, she helped develop NZ.com, the first major website for New Zealand which was launched by several CMU graduate students from that country. She also picked up a second work study role during her summer studies between junior and senior years as a research assistant for the Human Computer Interaction Institute where she worked on the process modeling project for remote medical robotic hip replacement.

Upon graduation from Carnegie Mellon University in December 1996, her first job was working for Xerox in Rochester, New York as a member of IDHI, or the Industrial Design and Human Interface, department as a user interface designer. She worked on the sixth generation products for high-volume imaging and printing, code named Lakes, Jadis and Hodaka. Her work involved developing portable interface standards that could allow for complete remote control of these series of devices as well as integrating the use of a new Java prototyping tool from Autodesk that would cut down the time to production of linking internal machine operating systems with the user interface systems.
 * Xerox

She was hired in November of 1997 to be the web administrator for ChemCenter, the on-line web-portal for the American Chemical Society, based in Washington, DC. While working there, she performed the first two live Internet broadcasts from within the Longworth House Office Building, and a few weeks later from the United States Capitol utilizing an Apple Computer Powerbook G3, RealAudio and a relay server housed at ACS and connected via a modem from Capitol Hill.
 * American Chemical Society

2000s
 * Stan Lee Media
 * Namesafe
 * GP eLearning
 * Raven Technologies
 * Constellation Energy
 * TWM Associates
 * The World Bank
 * Software Engineering Institute

2010s In April of 2014, she began work as a Policy Analyst for the Office of Management and Budget's "Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology" under the Federal CIO, Steven VanRoekel, as part of the Presidential Management Council's Interagency Rotation Program Fellowship. In that capacity she helped prepare the CIO for Congressional testimony as her initial duties, but also reviewed and provided feedback on several proposed pieces of legislation, including those involving cybersecurity initiatives. She later worked on one of the initial pilots for the United States Digital Service, working on ELIS, an electronic version for filing I-90 renewals and replacements, as an technical advisor and project manager. During the second half of her detail, she was elected as acting policy lead for the Open Data Initiative. In between that, she modernized how the office performed agency PortfolioStat briefings by developing a system that took place solely on mobile tablet devices, which helped save a significant amount of money over publishing in printed format, and gave analysts more time to quality check the reports before presentation.
 * United States Department of the Interior
 * Executive Office of the President of the United States

It was later reported that she was the first openly transgender civil service employee to work at the White House.

In December of 2014, Amélie began work at The Walt Disney Company as Senior Architect, Architecture and Technology Strategy. In that role she is responsible for CTO-like activities, ranging from research to development of programmatic technology strategy for the entire Walt Disney Company. She left The Walt Disney Company in November 2015 to return to Federal service. In November 2015, she began work as the Manager of Security Architecture and Services for the United States Treasury Department out of the Office of the Associate CIO for Cybersecurity. In this role she is responsible for implementing the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security across the entire agency and development of a "cybersecurity service catalog" to optimize such offering across all ten (10) bureaus within the agency. Starting in January 2017, Amélie took the role of Deputy Chief Information Officer for HHS' Inspector General's Office, and in this role she acts as the "chief of staff" for the Office of Information Technology in the Office of Management and Policy overseeing budget planning, program management, and overall strategy activities for the IG. In February 2017, she was recognized as one of the "Top Women in Cybersecurity" by FedScoop. In 2017 she also spoke at DEFCON 25 and at Amazon AWS re:Invent. She transitioned to the Chief Technology Officer role in 2018 and led the introduction of low-code platforms and second generation cloud architecture for HHS OIG's Digital Services Team. As of December 2019, Amélie served as a Senior Technology Advocate for Splunk in the ITOM group under Vice President of Research and Advisory, Andi Mann. In September 2021, Amélie joined Electronic Arts as the Director of External Technology Partnerships, where she works with global technology innovators to match up internal EA teams and projects with providers of advanced solutions. In January 2024, Amélie joined Walmart Global Technology as a Director on their Red Team after a layoff from Electronic Arts in September 2023.
 * The Walt Disney Company
 * United States Department of the Treasury
 * U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - Office of the Inspector General
 * Splunk
 * Electronic Arts
 * Walmart

Hobbies and Interests
As of February 2022, she was invited as a Non-Resident, Senior Fellow for the Atlantic Council, where her research into managing open source security, digital supply chain, and technology integration and policy development will be highlighted. In April 2022, she was elected to be a board member for TOOOL, The Open Organization of Lockpickers for North America.

Sports
An avid skier since the age of four, she's recently taken up triathlons as a source of exercise and stress management during the skiing off-season. As a younger skier, she had been ranked in the top 10 ski racers in Ohio and Maryland in her age group via NASTAR in the early 1990s.