Heather Adkins is a cybersecurity expert with over 20 years of industry experience. As a founding member of the Google Security Team, Heather has built a global organization responsible for maintaining the safety and security of the company’s infrastructure. She developed Google’s first programs for security assurance, which have evolved to address an ever-changing threat landscape. She helps set Google-wide strategy for protecting its infrastructure and users, and has led the response to significant security incidents such as Operation Aurora.<br />Heather has spent her career uplifting security for the world beyond her role at Google. In 2016 she volunteered to respond to threats facing the US Presidential election. In 2017 she joined the Harvard Belfer Center’s bi-partisan Defending Digital Democracy initiative, focusing on security playbooks and training for campaigns and election officials.<br />Heather has briefed the National Academy of Sciences on the topics of breach recovery, incident response, insider risks and building modern safe computing environments. She has also presented in forums such as the RSA security conference, lectured at Universities like the Politecnico di Milano, and briefed executives and security teams of Fortune 500 companies. She is currently a strategic advisor for the Silverado Policy Accelerator.<br />Heather is a co-author of Building Secure and Reliable Systems (O’Reilly, 2020) This book reflects her mantra that we need to have security-by-default, for everyone.<br />In her spare time Heather studies early medieval European history and is passionate about saving wild Elephant populations.