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Kathy Kirwan

Remember when your teacher began lectures by saying, "Now pay attention—there will be a quiz on this"? Kathy Kirwan does. And with every test—some professional, some personal—she's not only passed, but excelled.

"When it comes to the work world, I think you should always push yourself," says Kirwan, program manager for MITRE's support to the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), Department of Homeland Security (DHS). "You often have to ask, 'Is this a little hard for me? Am I stretching?'" For instance, earlier in her career, Kirwan's dread of public speaking spurred her to grab every briefing opportunity she could get. As a result, she overcame her fear and now speaks to large groups frequently—and calmly.

This willingness to face her fears has not only carried Kirwan through a successful career, but through a series of personal challenges as well. Around the time MITRE recruited her from private industry in 1986, she'd just been diagnosed with cancer. "My boss told me to come and start here anyway, despite the fact I had to undergo treatment," she says. "MITRE was uniformly wonderful—never anything but supportive."

Fortunately, she recovered and went on to spend several years in our McLean, Virginia, office, working for two different MITRE centers. Most of the work was classified, so she's understandably quiet about it. One aspect of the job she will discuss, however, is her time working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As an employee of a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC), she qualified for a program that allows government employees to spend time at other agencies.

Kirwan became part of a small team analyzing a CIA problem: identifying and incubating emerging information technologies that could be applied to intelligence problems. The team proposed creating a not-for-profit company in the private sector to work openly for the CIA and focus on finding, developing, and funding information technologies for the agency, as well as other government and private organizations.

"The company is called In-Q-Tel," she says proudly. "It's still out there and doing great, looking for innovative solutions to technical problems."

Invested in the MITRE Ideal

Although the possibility of becoming an In-Q-Tel employee arose, Kirwan says she never gave it serious consideration. "I'm really invested in the FFRDC notion—I always planned on coming back to MITRE," she says.

In 2000, she returned to our McLean office, this time working for the Center for Enterprise Modernization, or CEM, to help modernize the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Before her stint at the CIA, Kirwan had been a MITRE department head for 10 years, doing mainly intelligence community work. The new offer intrigued her.

"I work at my best when I'm challenged, and going back to my old position didn't feel like stretching myself," she says. Despite the fact that Kirwan is completely in favor of pushing herself professionally, she admits she might have stretched a little too much—at first. "I felt more than a little intimidated," she remembers. "I knew almost no one in that part of MITRE, and I didn't know the people at the IRS. It was somewhat difficult in the beginning." Her experience in building customer relationships carried her through those early days, however, and she quickly became a valuable member of the MITRE IRS team.

Maintaining Balance, Finding Support

About two years ago, the CEM leadership asked her to join MITRE's DHS team. "I still had all my clearances, and the work is closer to my background," she says. "I'm leading our support for the CIO's office, primarily for the chief technology officer. We're helping guide their enterprise architecture development, advising on the technologies they should consider implementing, and helping them build a classified communications network. It's been very gratifying watching the relationship between DHS and MITRE develop."

While she insists on pushing herself professionally, she also insists on maintaining a home and work life balance. This balance has helped her as she simultaneously advanced at MITRE and reared three children with her husband; the youngest child is now 14. And when her middle child fought a debilitating illness and she herself had a recurrence of poor health, Kirwan continually found the support that she'd discovered 18 years ago.

"That's what's so great about working at MITRE," she says. "There's both a wealth of opportunities and a lot of encouragement. I've been in three centers and found good work and good people at each of them. It's fundamental to why many of us are here—getting to work with great people while making a difference."

—by Alison Stern-Dunyak