Afrah is a first-year Computer Engineering student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Banneker/Key Scholar. She is also a member of the ACES Honors College, which focuses on advanced cybersecurity. Throughout elementary and middle school, she participated in various computer science workshops, programs, and summer camps, including CompSciConnect and Girls Who Code. In high school, she volunteered as a teaching assistant for I4C, where she had the opportunity to mentor younger students and share her knowledge and passion for programming. As a college student, she is steadily building the knowledge and skills necessary for a career in cybersecurity.

Dr. Jan is an Emeritus Faculty of the Computer Science Department.  She was the founding Director of the Maryland Center for Women in Computing and of the Iribe Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing.  She was also the founding Associate-Director of ACES (the first undergraduate cybersecurity honors program). She was first employed by UMD’s OIT in 1989 and became a faculty member in UMD's Computer Science Department in 1990.  For 15 years, she also worked on university computer science capacity building projects in sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan. She holds graduate degrees in both computer science and education; her work focuses on computer science education - curriculum development, pedagogical methods and underrepresented populations in computing. She encourages both quality of content and access to computing for students (elementary-school to graduate-school) through teaching, outreach programs and teacher professional development. She is currently an Associate Professor of Computer and Data Sciences at Ripon College in Ripon Wisconsin.