Trent Townsend

Trent Townsend has a wealth of experience in the field of cyber security. Trent began their career in 2003 as a Cyber Security Specialist for the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. In this role, they were responsible for all security-related matters concerning the DoD Supercomputing Resource Center at the US Army Engineer R&D Center. Trent provided technical leadership and managed a team of four to perform various tasks including documentation review and maintenance, execution and modification of assessment scripts, network vulnerability assessments, database analysis and review, and system configuration modifications of DoD high performance, infrastructure and user systems to maintain secure system and network configurations. In 2009, they moved into the role of Chief Executive Officer at Next Step Innovation.

Trent Townsend received a Master's degree in Computer and Information Systems Security/Information Assurance from Mississippi State University between 2002 and 2004. Prior to that, they obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Mississippi College between 1997 and 2001. In March 2009, they obtained a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification from (ISC)².