As a senior cyber and digital technology executive, Melissa Sutherland drives implementation of Booz Allen’s national cyber strategy across the intelligence community with a focus on United States Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. She provides leadership in the areas of scaling enterprise technology, analytics, cyber, and digital-transformation support across national cybersecurity missions.
Melissa has more than 20 years of professional experience serving the defense and intelligence communities, specializing in the delivery of mission-critical software and cyber systems to the U.S. government. She oversees a team of experts in the development of new approaches to performing offensive and defensive cyber operations—approaches that rely heavily on automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to reduce the time and effort needed to detect cyber vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and respond to threats.
Prior to joining Booz Allen in 2007, Melissa served as the government civilian director of the Joint Intelligence Laboratory Experimentation Division in support of the Joint Transformation Command, Intelligence (JTC-I). There she led the conduct of intelligence experimentation and engineering design events on behalf of the intelligence community.
Her expertise includes managing a diverse division of innovation and experimentation project teams and the application of innovative information technology approaches to defense intelligence problems. During her tour at JTC-I, she also served as the government advisor on the Army Science Board, which included providing recommendations to the Secretary of the Army on scientific and technical engineering matters. Additionally, Melissa served for 8 years as a signals intelligence officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, where she conducted real-time intelligence operations and commanded signals intelligence collection teams.
She is an AWS-certified cloud practitioner, change management practitioner, service-oriented architecture consultant, Agile SCRUM Master, and information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) practitioner. In 2012 she was awarded the Society of Women Engineers Emerging Leader Award.
Melissa holds an M.S. in telecommunications management from the University of Maryland University College and a B.S. in biology from the University of New Mexico.
