Wen Masters, Ph.D.

As vice president of cyber technologies, Wen Masters directs MITRE's corporate cybersecurity strategy and serves as the champion for MITRE-wide cybersecurity capabilities. Leading a group of 1,200 experts, she oversees our innovation centers in cyber solutions, cyber operations and effects, cyber infrastructure protection, and software engineering. Working together, the team addresses the most difficult cyber threats facing the nation. They are helping government and private industry secure critical infrastructure and defend against online theft and exploits by hostile adversaries.

Masters partners with MITRE’s federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), including the National Cybersecurity FFRDC, extending our impact through industry using platforms such as the MITRE ATT&CK^® framework and threat intelligence–sharing standards such as STIX™ and TAXII™. She also collaborates with the MITRE Accelerator and MITRE Engenuity, a foundation for public good, to drive success of industry-facing cyber initiatives, such as the Center for Threat Informed Defense.

Before joining MITRE in 2021, Masters was deputy director of research at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and co-lead of the Commission on Research Next, developing a roadmap and comprehensive strategy for Georgia Tech’s research enterprise. She served as director of the Information and Cyber Sciences Directorate at GTRI, and as a principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech.

Masters spent more than a decade in the Senior Executive Service at the Office of Naval Research. There, she led the Navy’s Integrated Science and Technology portfolio in Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. The Navy awarded Masters its Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, Superior Civilian Service Medal, and Meritorious Civilian Service Medal. She also served on the Army Science Board and the National Academy of Sciences Naval Studies Board.

Prior to her civilian government service, Masters worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where she was responsible for orbit determination for NASA’s deep space exploration missions, including Magellan, Galileo, and Cassini.

Masters was a member of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, where she served as vice chair for the SIAM Imaging Science Activity Group and the Association for Women in Mathematics. She has published several articles in technical journals and conference proceedings, and edited a book, Mathematical Modeling in Optical Science.

In 2023, the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers honored Masters with a Career Achievement Award, and the Security Industry Association named her to its Women in Security Forum’s Power 100 class.

Masters holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of California, Irvine.