Priscilla Taylor

I work in the Risk and Compliance Division within Cybersecurity at Georgia Tech, where I've been for about 4 years. My typical day involves working with the Office of Sponsored Projects, dealing with Department of Defense, Department of War, Army, Navy, Air Force teams, some secret departments that need research, and NASA. We work with projects that may need research from our institution. What I do is vet whoever's working on these projects - I have to make sure the compliances are in check on the machines as well as the employee. We do background checks, and we also do compliance training for them to make sure that they understand the project that they're working on. One of the challenges is that we have to wait on comprehensive, enhanced background checks if we have foreign or international students working on projects. Before cybersecurity, I spent over 20 years in banking and finance as a branch manager, where I touched a lot of different tentacles - working with inside branch tellers, financial sales representatives, brokerage, mortgage division, and consumer loans. I was able to influence different avenues of banking, finance, savings, sales, homeownership, and continued knowledge of investment. I transitioned to higher education when I obtained my master's degree in 2016 because I was extremely interested in higher education and wanted to go in there as a professor. However, I was introduced to the IT department and became extremely eager to learn about cybersecurity. They gambled on my professionalism and my education, as well as my history of network engineering, and awarded me the position as telecom supervisor over customer care. An opportunity presented itself within cybersecurity where I was the office manager, Executive Manager of the information security Chief of Operations. Under his wing and tutelage, he mentored me to learn about cybersecurity through incident response, governance, risk, and compliance, and identity and access.