Kathleen Fisher
Director, Innovation Information Office, DARPA
Kathleen Shanahan Fisher was born in 1969 in San Marino, California. She earned an undergraduate degree in Math and Computer Studies at Stanford University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
She worked at AT&T Labs Research, becoming a principal member of the technical staff. She was a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford. She later became a program manager at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense. Concurrent with her scientific research there, she was also a professor of computer science at Tufts University.
Fisher is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In the News…
Director of the Information Innovation Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Kathleen Fisher seeks to increase the use of cybersecurity to prevent catastrophic cyber incidents. She said that the department has had a habit of waiting until a breach has occurred to address software vulnerabilities.
“We have many critical mission systems that have these kinds of vulnerabilities in them, and the way we’ve learned to deal with them is after they’ve been attacked, after we’ve learned, ‘OK, that’s a bad one,’ we then go and fix it,” Director Fisher said. “We pay billions of dollars after the fact to go fix these problems.”
Director Fisher spoke about the software design approach, called “formal methods,” that designs software through mathematical analysis and verifying performance as it is built, rather than security testing it after it’s written.
“We can imagine a world without these software vulnerabilities, where we can eliminate the sense of learned helplessness across DOD, where we can rapidly secure critical systems… and where we can create a sustainable ecosystem of formal-methods tools that are ready and off the shelf for people to use,” Director Fisher said.
