Tarah Wheeler is an information security executive, AI researcher specializing in natural language processing, social data scientist in international conflict, author, and poker player. She is Chief Security Officer at TPO Group, a cybersecurity consulting firm focused on nation-state incident response, critical infrastructure, and cyber risk. She is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Board of Directors, where she chairs the Audit Committee, serves on the Governance Committee, and founded the annual EFF DEF CON Poker Tournament. She is Senior Fellow and Board Member at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Cyber Policy Initiative, where she leads the next phase of DEF CON Franklin, a pioneering volunteer-driven cyber defense initiative protecting rural water utilities.
She is a doctoral scholar at the University of Oxford‘s Oxford Internet Institute and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, affiliated with the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford. She is an IANS Research faculty member and a Foreign Policy contributor on cyber warfare. She served as Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (2022–2025), where she testified before the US Senate on the Cyber Safety Review Board and moderated the RSAC 2024 keynote on Tech Diplomacy with US Cyber Ambassador Nathaniel Fick; she was elected to Life Membership at CFR in 2023.
She has been a US/UK Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security, a Cyber Project Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, the Brookings Institution’s contributing cybersecurity editor, and an International Security Fellow at New America leading cybersecurity capacity building with the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. She is a 5x founder and entrepreneur including founding Red Queen Technologies, and is the author of the best-selling Women In Tech: Take Your Career to The Next Level With Practical Advice And Inspiring Stories.
She has spoken and testified on information security at the United States Senate, European Union, NATO CCDCOE’s CyCon 2025 in Tallinn, Malaysian Securities Commission, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the OECD, FTC, and at universities including Stanford, West Point, and Oxford. She has been Head of Offensive Security & Technical Data Privacy at Splunk, Senior Director of Engineering and Principal Security Advocate at Symantec Website Security, and led projects at Microsoft Game Studios (Halo and Lips). She has multiple cashes in the World Series of Poker.
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Yes, there was a hidden epic cryptographic puzzle story inside my book, “Women In Tech.”
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