2020 Women in Biometrics award winner Anne May is the OBIM Biometric Support Center Lead for the Office of Biometric Identity Management with the Department of Homeland Security. She wound up in this career by chance. In 1998, she took on a new position at the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a systems portfolio manager. […]

Like many leaders in the biometric industry, Lauren Reed, Senior Program Director for Biometric Forensics, IDEMIA National Security Solutions, knew nothing of biometrics when her career began in the mid-1990s. “I was doing traditional forensics work at a local sheriff’s office,” Reed says. “I received a phone call from an old mentor who said the […]

Annet Steenbergen is the co-founder/initiator of the Aruba Happy Flow biometric border control project for the Government of Aruba. The journey to Happy Flow began 25 years ago when she stumbled into a job with the Dutch Immigration Naturalization Service. “Before long, I worked mostly in border management and border management policy,” Steenbergen says. “I […]

Face morphing, where an attacker merges photos of two people into a single image, is a specialty of Mei Ngan, Computer Scientist, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and leader in morph detection. “If that image gets onto an identity credential such as a passport, it can be used by both people because modern […]

Dr. Nicole Spaun began her career staring at planets. “I got my PhD in geology, looking specifically at planetary geology. During graduate school, I worked with NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter and its moons,” Spaun says. “About two months before I defended my dissertation – about a month after 9/11 – someone who’d gone to […]

Dr. Dana Michalski was looking for work in research as she pursued her degree in behavioral science and psychology. She found a job at Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation as it was then known. “I started by working half my time on Army projects working with soldiers, and the other half my time working […]

Like many of today’s leaders in biometrics, Debra Marcopulos’ career path was influenced by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “I actually became interested in the technology that was being developed to help secure our country, specifically fingerprint technology. So when opportunities for DHS’ mission to modernize this legacy technology became available, I eagerly accepted the position.” […]

If your international air travel experience has gotten easier, you may have Sherry Stein, SITA America’s Head of Technology Strategy, to thank. “In 2016, we began working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and JetBlue in particular around how to help implement biometric exit in a way that would become something that would be […]

Anne Wang began her biometrics career over a quarter century ago as a research scientist for Cogent (now Gemalto). “Back in the 90s, biometrics was mostly used by law enforcement. At that time, this kind of technology was not really known to the general public other than in science fiction movies,” Wang says. “But in […]

2018 Women in Biometrics Award winner Lisa MacDonald serves as Director of Identity Capabilities Management Division, DHS Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM). But MacDonald didn’t know how to spell biometrics when she stumbled into the industry. “I was an English major; I have a Master’s in Public Administration,” MacDonald says. “I did come to […]