Suzanne Spaulding

Suzanne Spaulding is a senior adviser for Homeland Security and the Director of the Defending Democratic Institutions Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She also currently serves as a member of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission and as a member of the Homeland Security Experts Group.

Prior to joining CSIS, Spaulding served as Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has since become the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In this role, she managed a $3 billion budget and a workforce of 18,000, charged with strengthening cybersecurity and protecting the nation's critical infrastructure.

Spaulding has served in Republican and Democratic administrations and on both sides of the aisle in Congress. Prior to working at DHS, she was general counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Minority Staff Director for the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She also spent six years at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she was legal adviser to the director's Nonproliferation Center. She was Executive Director for two Congressionally mandated commissions on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Additionally, she spent more than 10 years as an attorney in private practice, including serving as Security Counsel to the Business Roundtable.

She is an advisor to Nozomi Networks, on the Advisory Board of Harvard Belfer Center's Defending Digital Democracy Project, former chair of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security, founder of the Cybersecurity Legal Task Force, and was a member of the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th President, as well as Harvard University's Long-Term Legal Strategy Project for Preserving Security and Democratic Freedoms in the War on Terror. Spaulding has also convened and participated in numerous academic and professional advisory panels, been a frequent commentator in public media, and often testified before Congress.

Spaulding holds a Bachelor's degree in economics and a Juris Doctorate degree in law from the University of Virginia.