Yatia Hopkins – eSentire

Why nominated: Yatia Hopkins brings the mentoring skills she honed as lead of eSentire’s Solutions Engineering team to Yeshiva University’s MS in Cybersecurity program. A frequent participant in women's career organizations, Hopkins is committed to making a positive impact on the next generation of tech and cyber leaders.

Profile: This past April, Hopkins joined Manhattan-based Yeshiva as an adjunct professor, bringing with her vast experience in undertaking industry-wide problems related to cyber hygiene, labor shortages, the state of cybersecurity education and training and diversity. Hopkins’ lesson plans align with key industry certifications (CISSP, CISM, and ISACA-CRISC) and cover state-of-the-art technologies and practices.

Hopkins is consistently looking to make a positive impact on the next generation of female leaders. She is currently a volunteer for Built by Girls, helping prepare young women everywhere to claim their place in the careers, industries and roles they want. She has also teamed up with Leading Cyber Ladies, a meetup for women working in the cybersecurity sector and girls who aspire to join the industry. In this capacity, she recently co-led a Kali Linux cracking password beginner’s workshop.

Outside of workshops and conferences, Hopkins also offerings mentorship by connecting with individuals through LinkedIn and providing career path and certification or education guidance.

Hopkins believes organizations looking to respond to increasingly sophisticated cyber threats should take a “less is more” approach by ensuring that any added tools genuinely reduce risk and yield a return on the investment. She supports the notion that improving data visibility can help organizations better prioritize which technical controls are necessary expenditures by helping determine where vulnerabilities lie, what areas of the network need improvement, and where to find risk associated with third-party vendors.

What colleagues say: “When I joined the Katz School of Science and Health as the Director of the Cybersecurity Program, Tia was the first person I thought of when I asked myself ‘Who would I want as one of my professors to help instill in our students, the knowledge and confidence to make a contribution to our field?’ She is the perfect combination of security knowledge with amazing presentation skills. Since accepting the position, she has proven herself to be an outstanding addition to our faculty. She has volunteered to oversee portions of the curriculum, met with enrolled students to help mentor them, and conducted in-depth technical seminars.” – David L. Schwed, J.D., director of the MS in Cybersecurity program, Yeshiva University