Join the Homeland Defense and Security (HDIAC), Cybersecurity and Information Systems (CSIAC), and Defense Systems (DSIAC) Information Analysis Centers as they host a DoDIAC webinar on Wednesday, April 15, from 1200 to 1300 EDT, titled “NREL’s Energy Security and Resilience Center”.

This webinar discusses the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s ongoing work to ensure energy security and resilience in today’s interconnected and interdependent world. Today, widely available software applications and internet-enabled devices have been integrated into most industrial control systems, delivering many benefits, but also increasing system vulnerability, thereby putting sectors of critical infrastructure at risk. NREL is working to incorporate intrinsic security in evolving technologies and is proposing evolutionary approaches to making energy and communications systems resilient to a disruption, no matter the cause, and having the ability to identify, detect, respond, and recover in large part on their own. Through NREL’s Virtual Cyber Research Platform, researchers can evaluate the responses of interdependent and interconnected components in a multilayer emulated grid environment to better understand how to improve the security, resilience, and blackstart recovery of today’s critical infrastructure. This capability allows researchers to safely launch attacks in a virtual world on both emulated and actual physical devices and evaluate how they would respond to an attack in the real world.

Presenter:

Dr. Bennett recently joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as senior technical advisor to the Energy Security and Resilience Center. Dan came to NREL from the Army Cyber Institute at the U.S. Military Academy where he led research at the Army’s premier think tank for information warfare operations-related research. While at West Point, he was also an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science where he was the Academy’s recognized expert in analog, digital, and wireless communications systems, and networks. He also recently served a yearlong tour as technical director advisor to the 2-star commander of U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force at Ft. Meade, MD. Dan’s previous experience includes 15 months as Director of the Joint Network Operations & Security Center for Combined Joint Task Force – 101 in Bagram, Afghanistan. Dan has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a focus in Communications and Digital Signal Processing.