Title: Changing the Calculus: Cybersecurity Education Then, Now, and Beyond

Bio: Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Hawthorne, CISSP, is currently a Professor and Graduate Program Director of Cybersecurity at the Arlington, VA campus of Northeastern University. She also serves on the Board of the MS Pathways Consortium at the Center for Inclusive Computing at Northeastern U. Previously, Dr. Hawthorne was faculty and founding Graduate Program Director of Cybersecurity at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ. At Rider, she and her colleagues secured a grant to develop an inclusive post-baccalaureate bridge program for non-STEM graduates switching to technical careers in cybersecurity. Prior to Rider and after nearly 26 years, Dr. Hawthorne retired as a Senior Professor Emerita of Computer Science and Cybersecurity from Union County College (UCC) in Cranford, NJ. While at UCC, she served as PI of the NSF Cyber Service! Interdisciplinary & Experiential Education for Cyber Forensics Technicians grant. She currently serves as PI of the NSF Fortifying Cybersecurity and Computing Education through ATE grants (FORCCE) at Prince George's Community College in Largo, MD.  

Dr. Hawthorne served on the Joint Taskforce comprised of four professional computing organizations that produced seminal cybersecurity curriculum recommendations entitled, Cybersecurity Curricular 2017: Curriculum Guidelines for Post-Secondary Degree Programs in Cybersecurity. She also served as Co-chair of the ACM Education Board for four years and Chair of the ACM Committee for Computing Education in Community Colleges (CCECC). She currently serves as an ABET Program Evaluator for cybersecurity and computer science. Since its inception, she has been an active member of the Women in Cybersecurity organization and in 2023 was awarded their Advocacy Award. Also in 2023, Dr. Hawthorne was recognized by Marquis Who's Who as a Top Educator for her dedication to the field of cybersecurity. You can read more about Dr. Hawthorne in her 2024 People of ACM Profile. While not working, Beth enjoys giving private tours on Cyber Physh Boat Tours in Southwest Florida.

Title: A Knight in Shining Armor or a Genie out of the Bottle? Challenges and Opportunities of leveraging Digital Technologies such as Generative AI in Education: Beyond Programming, and Beyond Computing   

Bio: Brett’s exclusive research area is computing education, broadly construed, but often focusing on the psychology of programming, programming error messages, novice programmer behaviour, and GenAI in education. He is the Vice-Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE) and served on the Steering Committee of the CS 2023 ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI International Task Force for the revision of Computer Science Curricula 2013, where he chaired the “Ethics, Society, and the Profession” Knowledge Area subcommittee. Brett is also on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Computing Education, and author of a school-level textbook aligned with the Irish Computer Science curriculum that is used in ~90% of schools that teach the subject in Ireland. He is on the Steering Committee of several conferences including the ACM Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ACM ITiCSE) conference, and the UK & Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference. Brett chairs the ACM Global Computing Education (ACM CompEd) conference Steering Committee. In 2020 he was awarded a National Forum Teaching and Learning Research Fellowship, Ireland’s most prestigious national individual teaching & learning award in higher education. After completing a BA in Physics and a BA in Computer Science, Brett undertook an MSc in Computational Science followed by a PhD in Heterogeneous High-Performance Parallel Computing. A few years later Brett completed an MA in Higher Education and transitioned to exclusively researching computing education. Brett is a Professional Member of ACM, SIGCSE, SIGCAS, a member of IEEE-CS and a Senior Member of IEEE. He is joining SIGITE when his ACM renewal is due. Almost all of Brett’s 150+ talks and papers are available open-access from brettbecker.com.