TechCongress

Katerina Sedova

Senate Homeland Security Committee

Katerina is a mid-career technologist and international security policy professional. She recently earned a Master of Science in Foreign Service with distinction from Georgetown University. She combines research focus on issues at the intersection of national security and emerging threats in the digital domain with regional expertise on Russia, Ukraine, and NATO.

Katya wrote and briefed in the areas of countering state-sponsored disinformation, dynamics and conflict resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, deterrence and diplomacy in the cyber domain, analysis of major cyber breaches, nuclear and cyber cross-domain deterrence, the mechanics of computational propaganda, and implications of their merging with cyber operations and AI to the future of warfare. At the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, she co-authored a study on the evolution of Russian state-sponsored actors, tactics, and vulnerability of social media platforms to disinformation. She collaborated on research projects and prototype solutions on disinformation and situational awareness for the Departments of State and Defense. Katerina is a Ukrainian-American and is fluent in Russian and Ukrainian languages.

Prior to graduate school, Katya had a thirteen-year career at Microsoft, where she led a team of engineers to deliver quality assurance in the critical layers of the Internet Explorer browser through six product releases, impacting 1.5 billion customers in 109 languages worldwide. She drove test design strategy and project-managed quality assurance of architectural performance optimizations and security features of the http networking and web platform.

Katerina served with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Minority staff. She is currently a research fellow for the Cyber AI Project at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.