Full Name
Bradford Willke
Job Title
Senior Advisor for Stakeholder Engagement, Cybersecurity and infrastructure Security Agency
Company
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Speaker Bio
Mr. Bradford Willke serves as Senior Advisor for Stakeholder Engagement, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). In this role, he develops partnerships across the private and public sectors to achieve strategic and operational collaboration. As a Senior-Level, career federal employee, he supports the Agency's goal of creating and enhancing outcome-oriented relationships for its stakeholders, partners, and customers. A critical success factor in his role is ensuring a clear "front door,” access, and convening procedures exist for customers looking for CISA's capacity building and risk reducing products and services – programs that coordinate closely with industry, state and local government, academic, and non- profit partners to channel common goals and objectives into meaningful community of interest outcomes to manage national risk. Mr. Willke also served as the Acting Assistant Director for Stakeholder Engagement from June 2019 to October 2020, and was instrumental in standing up CISA and shaping the vision and functions necessary for 21st century stakeholder engagement operations.

Mr. Willke served as the Eastern U.S. Supervisory Cyber Security Advisor (CSA), from 2010 to 2018, and was the Agency’s very first CSA. Before joining DHS, Mr. Willke led field studies and research projects in cyber security for more than 10 years while in the Software Engineering Institute’s CERT® Division. Three of his proudest achievements while at CERT were in creating the OCTAVE™ suite of information security risk assessments, in leading the DHS cyber investigative efforts related to the 2003 Northeast U.S. Power Outage and in drafting all of the key cyber findings in the joint DOE-DHS final “Black Out” report, and in developing the Cyber Resilience Review – a practical evaluation method based on the CERT Resilience Management Model™.

Mr. Willke was a law enforcement specialist in the United States Air Force. His recognized skills with IT networks, database design and programming, and security management resulted in becoming his unit’s IT operations and cyber security manager – a position previously reserved for more senior personnel.

Mr. Willke completed the Senior Executive Fellows program, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Executive Education. He holds a master’s degree in Legal Studies, specializing in Homeland Security, from California University of Pennsylvania, a professional certificate in Information Protection and Security from the University of New Haven, a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems Technologies from Southern Illinois University, and an associate degree in Criminal Justice from the Community College of the Air Force.
Bradford Willke