Featured Speakers, Authors, and Guests
2024 Norwich University Military Writers’ Symposium
Featured Speakers, Authors, and Guests
The biographies of our 2024 distinguished featured speakers, authors, and guests appear below. We invite you to learn more about them.
Curt Boyd is currently serving as the Director of Training, Doctrine, and Proponency at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School. His previous government civilian experience included a short assignment as a talent management analyst at the Army Special Operations Command and seventeen months as the Deputy Director for USSOCOM’s Mission Support Element at Fort Liberty. In 2011, Curt retired as an Army Colonel and the Chief of Staff of the JFK Special Warfare Center and soon thereafter joined the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where he spent six years leading advanced technology development and in-depth research projects designed to solve some of the Army and the Special Operations community’s most difficult technical challenges. Mr. Boyd’s military service included 27 years in the Army with the first 7 spent in the infantry with assignments in Germany and Fort Bragg and the remaining 20 of those years spent in psychological operations units at Fort Liberty, where he successfully served in command and senior staff positions at the joint, component, and institutional levels. He is a 1984 Norwich graduate with a B.A in Interdisciplinary Studies and a Minor in Psychology, an M.A in Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict from the Naval Postgraduate School and was a distinguished fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Curt is married to another native of Massachusetts, Carolyn. They have two children, who live and work in North Carolina.
Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Project on Managing the Atom (MTA). She is the author of Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). Formerly, she held appointments of a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana is a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academies of Sciences. Her research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a Global Fellow. She is the 2024 recipient of the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award.
Nina Jankowicz is an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War (2020), which The New Yorker called “a persuasive new book on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy, ” and How to Be A Woman Online (2022), an examination of online abuse and disinformation and tips for fighting back, which Publishers Weekly named “essential.” Currently the Vice President at the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience, a non-profit focused on countering disinformation, Jankowicz has advised governments, international organizations, and tech companies, and testified before the US Congress, UK Parliament, and European Parliament.
In 2022, Jankowicz was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, an intra-agency best practices and coordination entity at the Department of Homeland Security; she resigned the position after a sustained disinformation campaign caused the Biden Administration to abandon the project. From 2017-2022, Jankowicz has held fellowships at the Wilson Center, where she led accessible, actionable research about the effects of disinformation on women and freedom of expression around the world. She advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship in 2016-17. Early in her career, she managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute.
Dr. Bilyana Lilly, CISSP is a cybersecurity and foreign policy leader with over twenty years of managerial, technical and research experience. She is the Chair of the Democratic Resilience Track of the Warsaw Security Forum, an advisor to the venture capital firm Night Dragon, and an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation. Dr. Lilly is a mentor and speaker at DefCon, CyCon and the Executive Women’s Forum. She has worked at the United Nations and Deloitte financial cyber advisory, and has advised the Pentagon, the White House, and NATO among others. She has a Ph.D. and three master’s degrees, including a degree from Oxford University (distinction). Dr. Lilly has published two books. Her second book titled Russian Information Warfare: Assault on Democracies in the Cyber Wild West became an Amazon best seller. She has been denounced by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and called a cyber expert by Tom Hanks
Scott Nelson currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the Director of Strategic Initiative's at the Cyber National Mission Force, United States Cyber Command. Scott served as the Director of Academic Engagement for United States Cyber Command and Deputy Chief of Staff Operations, G3 for Army Cyber Command prior to his retirement after 32 years on 1 July 2022 as a US Army Colonel. In addition to military service, Scott held the position as Vice President for Norwich University Applied Research Institutes from May 2018 and prior as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for SecureSet a Denver based cyber security education start-up. Over his 32 year career he has served in senior leadership positions in the Army, Government, Commercial and academic sectors. Scott’s expertise includes Information Warfare, Public Affairs, Legislative and Congressional Affairs and strategic planning.
Dr. Zizi Papacharissi is UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago and Department Head of Communication. She is also University Scholar and affiliate faculty with the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published 10 books, over 80 journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of fifteen journals. Zizi is the founding and current Editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Tencent, and Oculus and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in the US, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. Her latest book, titled After Democracy: Imagining our Political Future, is out now, from Yale University Press. She is presently working on two new books on Connective AI and Digital Media and Democracy.
Lieutenant General Laura Potter earned her commission in the Military Intelligence Corps in 1989. She is a Distinguished Military Graduate of Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, where she received a Bachelor’s Degree in Russian and Spanish. She holds a Master’s Degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies and a Master’s Degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College.
Lieutenant General Potter’s assignments include: Assistant S-2, 19th Support Command, Taegu, Republic of Korea; Division G-2 staff officer in 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry); Low Level Voice Intercept Platoon Leader in direct support of 2d Brigade, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry); Signals Intelligence Officer, Company Commander, and Battalion S-3, 704th Military Intelligence Brigade, Fort Meade, Maryland; V Corps Collection Manager; Battalion S-3, 302d Military Intelligence Battalion and Brigade Deputy Commander, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, Heidelberg and Wiesbaden, Germany; Joint Staff J-2 Intelligence Planner and Executive Assistant to the Joint Staff J-2; Commander 743d Military Intelligence Battalion, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado; Military Assistant, then Executive Officer to the 20th Secretary of the Army, the Honorable Pete Geren. In 2010, she returned to Europe to command Allied Command Counterintelligence, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, then served as the Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence G-2, U.S. Army Europe and the J-2, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany and as the Commanding General of the United States Army Intelligence Center of Excellence and Fort Huachuca. Her most recent assignment was Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 for the United States Army from 2020 to 2024. She assumed duties as the 58th Director of the Army Staff on January 5, 2024.
Her deployments include United Nations Military Observer in Abkhazia, Republic of Georgia; 302d Military Intelligence Battalion S-3, then Deputy Commander, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF); and Commander, Theater Intelligence Group, Combined Joint Task Force 435, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Afghanistan.
Lieutenant General Potter’s awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Legion of Merit (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Bronze Star Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Air Force Commendation Medal, Army and Joint Staff Identification Badges, the Parachutist Badge, and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, Cross of Merit, 3rd Class. She is married to LTC (Ret.) Randy Potter and they have two school aged sons.
Dr Eszter Szenes is a Lecturer at the School of Education, University of Adelaide and a Senior Fellow at the Norwich University Peace and War Center and the Center for Global Resilience and Security. Between 2020-2022 she was hosted by the Norwich University Peace and War Center as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research Fellow, co-hosted by the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Austria. Prior to joining Norwich, Dr Szenes held a post-doctoral researcher position at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She holds a doctorate in Linguistics from The University of Sydney. Dr Szenes was a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague, Netherlands. Her research focuses on the role of language and multimodal resources in emerging complex and interrelated societal threats, for example, information disorder, radicalisation and the links between climate change and (violent) extremism. She is especially interested in preventing and countering the effect of disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining democracies from the perspective of computer-mediated communication and critical digital and media literacies.
Dr. Diane Zorri is a Senior Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, specializing in Gulf politics, U.S. foreign policy, defense strategy, and maritime cybersecurity. She has held academic positions as an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the National Defense College of the United Arab Emirates, a tenured professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and a visiting professor at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.
Before transitioning to academia, Dr. Zorri served as an officer in the United States Air Force, gaining extensive experience in the aerospace and defense sectors. After her military service, she worked for an Italian-U.S. defense company, managing projects related to foreign military sales, integrated communications, and physical security. During the Iraq War, she contributed her expertise to Multi-National Corps-Iraq. Dr. Zorri's educational background includes a degree from the United States Air Force Academy, a graduate degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
Featured Norwich Faculty & Students
William Bain enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1985 and retired in 2012. During his twenty-seven years of service, he was a nuclear-trained submarine electrician on four submarines. Bain accomplished strategic deterrent patrols on a Trident submarine and Special Project Missions on a modified attack submarine. On his last submarine, he was selected for the Limited Duty Officer program and spent the next twelve years serving on “targets” (surface ships), including three Nimitz class carriers. Bain retired as a Lieutenant Commander. He received many personal and unit awards during his service, including a Presidential Unit Citation. Following retirement, he worked for Kimberly-Clark in Paris, Texas, as the platform engineer for Huggies Little Swimmers, Pull-ups, and Good-Nites. He is the inaugural Dennis E. Showalter Research Fellow for Norwich University's College of Graduate and Continuing Studies.
His son graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2022 and is currently a Marine First Lieutenant attending flight school and selected for jets. His wife is an accomplished equestrian and an artist and art instructor at a community college. He studies history, rides bicycles, and fly fishes poorly.
Lucia Frezza is a Senior from Wintersville, Ohio studying Computer Security and Information Assurance with a concentration in Digital Forensics and a minor in German. As a CyFER fellow, and a member of the CLDP, Lucia is very involved on campus with cybersecurity events, outreach and research. Her research focused on the threat profile of cyber actors and how they use perceptions is a gateway into the minds of independent cyber threat actors. In her spare time, her hobbies include rock climbing, horseback riding and drinking coffee. She is a 2024 Richard S. Schultz Symposium Fellow.
Dr. Karen Gaines has served as the Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Norwich University since 2022, where she oversees academic affairs and its internal operations. Dr. Gaines’s Ph.D. is in Environmental Toxicology from the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health. She is internationally recognized for her expertise in environmental and human toxicological risk assessment and worked for the Department of Energy prior to entering academia. Dr. Gaines is also a Certified Wildlife Biologist and has consulted for the USEPA, USFWS, USDA, NASA as well as the US Department of Defense and continues to serve these agencies in various capacities.
Jakon Hays, the Strategic Communications Specialist at Norwich University Applied Research Institutes (NUARI), is responsible for designing and driving awareness initiatives highlighting NUARI's commitment to making meaningful contributions to national security through cutting-edge solutions in cybersecurity, information strategies, defense technologies, and education. His work at NUARI brings him back to his alma mater, where he first developed his interests in military history, writing, and International Studies. Jakon is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Romania as a high school English teacher. Recently, he extended his commitment to service as a Peace Corps Virtual Participant, collaborating with Ukrainian middle and high school educators and students to enhance their English language proficiency, digital media literacy, and cultural understanding. Jakon spent 19 years as a researcher, archivist, and digital editor at Virginia's largest daily newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot, based in Norfolk, VA. He lives in upstate South Carolina, where he enjoys running and hiking the trails of the nearby mountains with his family.
Dumisani Janda is an international student from Zimbabwe studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. With a strong interest in technology and problem solving, Dumisani has been involved in several activities such as threatcasting, Information Warfare internships, OSINT programs and the AWS annual challenge. He is skilled in various programming languages and design software.
Lilian Lu is a Junior from Tucson, AZ, pursuing studies in the 4+1 Accelerated Master's Program in Computer Security and Information Assurance with a concentration in Digital Forensics. She is also minoring in Chinese, Information Warfare, and History in Naval Studies. On campus, Lilian is actively involved in several activities, including the Corps of Cadets, CDLP, Women's Rugby, and the Norwich Guidon (campus newsletter). She is currently working towards an Army Intelligence contract with aspirations to serve in a three-letter agency. Through the Schultz Fellowship, Lilian hopes to analyze the ethical implications through real-time news outlets through open-source intelligence on "the Gospel," AI targeting technology in the current Israel-Gaza conflict. She is a 2024 Richard S. Schultz Symposium Fellow.
Dr. W. Travis Morris joined the faculty of Norwich University in 2011. He teaches criminal justice in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and directs NU’s Peace and War Center. He teaches criminological courses in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and directs NU’s Peace and War Center. Morris holds a Bachelor of Arts in criminology from Northern Illinois University, a Master of Science in criminal justice from Eastern Kentucky University, and a doctorate from the University of Nebraska. He has published on information warfare and the relationship between policing, peacekeeping, counterterrorism, and counter-insurgency and is the author of the recent book, “Dark Ideas: How Violent Jihadi and Neo-Nazi Ideologues Have Shaped Modern Terrorism.” He has conducted ethnographic interviews in Yemen and published on how crime intersects with formal and informal justice systems in a socio-cultural context. His research interests include violent extremist propaganda analysis, information warfare, and text network analysis. He is an active teacher in and out of the classroom and has created a series of recent grant-funded student learning trips in the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Kristen Pedersen, PhD, NUARI’s Vice President and Chief Research Officer. Dr. Pedersen is responsible for execution of NUARI's portfolio of security contracts and research projects for DHS, DOD, NSA, and critical infrastructure organizations. She also oversees NUARI's Distributed Environment for Critical Infrastructure Decision-making Exercises (DECIDE®), and the development and delivery of information warfare, cybersecurity, and physical-threat focused exercises to test incident response protocol and improve organizational resiliency. Her research areas include influence/information operations, frame analysis, human/cyber behavior, and strategic communication. She is an adjunct professor and a former US Coast Guard Operations Specialist, television producer, and investigative researcher.
Mark W. Perry is the lead information warfare research analyst at the John and Mary Frances Patton Peace and War Center at Norwich University. He is also an adjunct professor at Norwich University’s Leahy School of Cybersecurity and Advanced Computing, where he teaches digital threat analysis and open-source research methods. His research interests include social cybersecurity, international relations, and comparative politics. Mark’s publications explore the strategies and tactics with which state and non-state actors craft narratives and wield influence in competition and conflict.
R. Pierce Reid is a Norwich Alumni with a Masters in Military history. He began his career in marketing which led to working in psychological operations and military information operations. He served as a speaker and later MC of the Norwich University InfoOps Symposium during the late '90's and early 2000's.He has published and consulted on Information Warfare since the early 2000's. He is currently retired from industry and defense and Chairs the Friends of The Norwich Military Writers Symposium and occasionally lectures on psychological warfare at Norwich.
COL Steve Roberts, PhD is the Professor of Military Science and Commanding Officer for the U.S. Army ROTC Pioneer Battalion at Norwich University. He is a Cyberwarfare Officer who commissioned in 1998 after completing Officer Candidate School. He has served over 34 years in numerous positions of increasing responsibility while also deploying in support of overseas operations across the globe.
Isabella Ross is a Senior at Norwich University and is from North Carolina. She is working towards earning a Bachelor of the Arts in Criminal Justice, a Bachelor of Science in Criminology, three minors in Political Science, Transnational Crime, and Information Warfare, and a concentration in Emergency Management. She has been an Information Warfare Research Intern with Norwich University Applied Research Institutes (NUARI) for the past year and a half where she focused her efforts on researching conflict overseas and malign influence campaigns.
Rachel Sickler is a Senior Developer and Machine Learning Engineer at Norwich University Applied Research Institutes. Rachel’s experience includes software engineering, business analytics, natural language processing, predictive analytics, model observability and explainability, data/process governance and end-to-end data engineering. Her current focus areas include information warfare, criminology and AI ethics. She holds bachelor's degrees in Accounting, Business and Computer Science and a a Master's degree in Data Science from Northwestern.
David J. Ulbrich, Ph.D assumed his current role as Associate Dean of the Arts and Sciences Division in the College of Graduate and Continuing Education in August 2022. He supervises all online programs in diplomacy, international relations, criminal justice, interdisciplinary studies, strategic studies, history and military history. Ulbrich also remains Associate Professor and Program Director of Master of Arts in History and in Military History programs since 2017. He earned his doctorate in history in 2007 from Temple University where he studied with Gregory Urwin, Richard Immerman, and the late Russell Weigley.
Ulbrich previously served as an adjunct instructor, course developer, and capstone advisor for Norwich from 2007 until 2017. Ulbrich also taught at Ball State University, Ohio University, and Rogers State University. He earned his doctorate in history in 2007 from Temple University where he studied with Gregory Urwin, Richard Immerman, and the late Russell Weigley.
Ulbrich is an award-winning author, instructor, and consultant.
Featured Works
Each year the Norwich University Military Writers' Symposium hosts authors and experts in the fields of military history, intelligence, and current affairs to offer important perspectives on pressing global concerns. Below are their works, for your reference.
Book plates for author signatures will be available during the event should you wish to have them sign a copy of the book.
