Dena Haritos Tsamitis

Dena Haritos Tsamitis
Director, Information Networking Institute
Director of Education, Training, and Outreach,CyLab
Adjunct Faculty, H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management

As Director of the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon University, Dena Haritos Tsamitis is responsible for the academic, administrative, and fiscal operations of the INI, which offers graduate programs in information networking (MSIN), information security technology and management (MSISTM) and information technology - information security (MSIT-IS) at Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, as well as in Athens, Greece, in Kobe, Japan, and in Aveiro and Lisbon, Portugal through hybrid distributed education formats. In her role Director of Education, Training, and Outreach for Carnegie Mellon CyLab, she is responsible for the strategic planning, implementation, and assessment of information security/assurance executive education, capacity building, and outreach programs.

To achieve CyLab's mission of making 10 million citizens worldwide "cyberaware", Tsamitis is designing and developing outreach and awareness initiatives, including the MySecureCyberspace game for children and portal for users at all levels. In order to accomplish this vision of cyberawareness, she has been working to build and leverage relationships with local and national school districts, universities, and other educational organizations. Tsamitis is also leading the education initiatives of the Situational Awareness for Everyone (SAFE) NSF center at CyLab, which explores ways to improve computer defenses by incorporating models of human/computer/attack interactions into the defenses themselves.

She also serves on the education board of the NSF TRUST, the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies, which brings together a visionary cybersecurity and infrastructure protection systems research team unparalleled in its strength and accomplishments, drawing on the expertise at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

Additionally, Tsamitis represents Carnegie Mellon on two prominent national task forces: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Task Force for Information Security Education and Awareness and the EDUCAUSE Security Education and Awareness Working Group. As a member of the DHS task force, she is involved in implementing the President's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace through a national awareness program to empower all Americans to secure their own parts of cyberspace. Through the EDUCAUSE working group, she is involved in raising awareness of information technology security issues amongst university and college computer and network users, administrators, and executives.

Tsamitis is an adjunct faculty member in Carnegie Mellon's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, where she teaches core courses in educational technology and distance learning to teachers and administrators of Pittsburgh area schools. She also conducted a program evaluation and redesign of the curriculum of the Master of Science in Educational Technology Management and created a certificate program that leads to the Instructional Technology Specialist Certificate issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Tsamitis began her career at Carnegie Mellon in 2000 as an Instructional Technology Design Specialist with the Office of Technology for Education. She consulted on numerous projects involving the integration of technology in education, evaluation of online and distance learning technologies and pedagogies, academic program evaluation, and academic program curriculum design. Additionally, she created and conducted workshops and seminars for faculty on the use of technologies in teaching. She was also instrumental in the evaluation, implementation, support, and deployment of the Blackboard course management system at Carnegie Mellon, which made a major impact on how courses are delivered at Carnegie Mellon.

In the early days of the Web, Dena was an Internet Analyst for Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she designed and developed online educational materials for 30,000 users worldwide. At Lilly, she designed the content architecture and interface of Lilly's award-winning intranet, ELVIS (Eli Lilly Virtual Information Server), as well as Lilly's corporate Web site - at that time, the first pharmaceutical site on the Web. Before joining Lilly, she was a computer programmer for USX Engineers and Consultants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dena holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master of Science in Education in Instructional Technology, Teaching with Distance Learning, from Duquesne University, where she also designed and taught a graduate course on Web-based education. Dena, fluent in Greek, lived in Greece for several years, where she co-founded and operated an English Language Institute.