Ms. Dean is the Director for the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) within the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications (CS&C) in the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD). In this role, she provides executive leadership in an effort to build and maintain an effective national cyberspace response system and implement a cyber-risk management program for the protection of critical infrastructure. She works collaboratively with public, private and international entities to secure the nation’s critical cyber infrastructure. Ms. Dean was formerly NCSD’s Deputy Director.

Ms. Dean is a certified Level 3 program manager. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in both Liberal Arts and Information Technology.  Ms. Dean also holds a Masters in Science Management Information Systems Security degree from Colorado Technical University.

Prior to Ms. Dean’s appointment as Acting Director, she served as Deputy Director of the Network Security Deployment (NSD) branch within NCSD and as the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), also known as EINSTEIN, Program Manager. She was responsible for acquiring and developing the appropriate technologies and processes in order to improve the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) operations response capabilities; integrate multiple cyber communities of interests; engage industry to increase the potential for industry/vendor generated technology; and enhance the ability to secure the nation’s cybersecurity posture.

Ms. Dean has more than 10 years of experience in Federal and Department of Defense communications and information technology systems development, operations, information assurance, and management.  Before joining DHS, Ms. Dean served as the Chief of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Information System Center overseeing DISA’s world-wide classified and unclassified administrative world-wide networks that support over 8,500 users.  While there, she lead the first ever, multi-million dollar contract for performance-based IT service support. 

She has also worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) Program Manager.  There she deployed a new secure voice system that leveraged voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), providing secure compartmented voice communications to anyone on an intelligence community network. Additionally, she fielded a single global secure grid of desktop video teleconference (VTC) systems that connects people so they can see each other face to face around the globe from their desktops.  She also served on a rotational assignment to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense National Information Infrastructure (ASD/NII) in support of Enterprise Wide Systems Engineering (EWSE) where her efforts led to a new policy framework within DOD to guide the development of the ~ $50 billion Transformational Communication investment portfolio.