Biography

I was born in a small city in Colombia, to a poor family, but one that considered education to be an extremely high value.  At 15 years old, I had the unusual privilege to be able to emigrate, by myself, to the U.S. to study.  I finished high-school in California, where I graduated with honors.  I went to Texas A&M to study Computer Science and eventually received a master’s in Linguistics from Trinity Western University in Canada.

Shortly after finishing at Texas A&M, I met a beautiful Kansas farm girl and was fortunate to marry her.  We have now been married over 30 years.  We settled in College Station, home of Texas A&M, and I went to work as a programmer.  I worked for a couple of companies doing software development for scientific and business applications, and then went to work for the university, as Senior Systems Analyst, leading a small team of programmers also developing business and scientific applications.

In 2000, as had been our long-time aspiration, we left our lives in College Station and went to work for SIL International, a non-profit doing full-time volunteer language and community development work among minority languages overseas until 2015.  I provided IT support, did software development, and ended up being elected as Director of Member Services, a senior leadership position in the organization.

We have four children, and in 2015 we decided to settle back into life in College Station to see our kids through college in the US.  I took a job at Texas A&M again, doing software development.  In April 2018 I was asked to join the newly formed Cyber-Security team as Senior Security Analyst, and have since received my CISSP certification.

Over the last few years, I have designed processes that have reduced the vulnerabilities in our public facing systems by 99.7%, and in our internal facing servers by 73%.  Where appropriate, I designed and built software that allowed us to make those gains by making use of automation and integration.  I place a great deal of value in bringing information together and putting it right in the hands of the people who are able to make the changes necessary to improving our security.  All security information on a system should be only a click away for the custodian of that system.