Samantha Salazar

I'm a strategic defense professional who has been in my field for four and a half years. My career path started with working on legislature issues in New Mexico, where I was focused on energy needs. That work drove me to strategic studies, and from there, learning about energy needs and security led me into the nuclear weapons field and understanding national security. My day-to-day looks different every day, but it's basically working with a team, coming up with what are the emerging threats to the United States that are going to happen, how can we close those gaps and seams, and looking 30 years down the road at what our strategic posture is going to look like. We come up with ideas and publish them - of course, they're all classified - but we work hard to understand what that's going to look like in the future. Last year, I was able to do a fellowship with the National Nuclear Security Administration. I was picked out of over a thousand applicants, and only 40 people were chosen, so I was able to learn a lot through that fellowship. Being able to be in that kind of space that's mainly male-dominated was a huge achievement.