Matthew Scholl

Division Chief

CSD/ITL/NIST

Matthew Scholl is the Chief of the Computer Security Division in the Information Technology 

Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His responsibilities 

include cryptographic standards used by the U.S. Government and internationally, 

Cybersecurity Research and Development at NIST, and Cybersecurity Standards and Guidelines 

for Federal Agency Security Programs. He also co-leads NIST's participation with Cybersecurity 

National and International Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and associated 

conformance testing programs. Mr. Scholl has a Master's in Information Systems from the 

University of Maryland and a bachelor's degree from the University of Richmond. He is a U.S. 

Army veteran and currently has more than 20 years of federal service.

André Mendes

CIO

Department of Commerce

André Mendes was appointed Chief Information Officer for the Department of Commerce in 

August of 2019. There, he has overall responsibility and oversight of all technology systems at 

the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) and its associated Bureaus (FY2020 Budget 

$3.8B).

Before, Mr. Mendes was responsible for all global technology platforms and systems for the 

International Trade Administration (ITA), the DOC bureau that manages global trade issues for 

the United States of America. There Mr. Mendes oversaw a rapid bureau-wide transformation 

effort making ITA the first Federal Agency/Bureau to be 100% cloud based, radically changing 

several workflows, enabling a massive scale-up of service provisioning quality, an 

unprecedented rise in employee morale and job satisfaction while also lowering overall 

operating costs to less than 11% of ITA’s appropriation.

Prior to DOC, Mr. Mendes spent eight years at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) in 

various executive roles; including CEO, COO, CIO, CTO and CFO. During his time at USAGM, Mr. 

Mendes managed overall Agency transformation generating over $360 million in savings from 

2010 through 2018 through aggressive global technology and facilities optimization with 

projected 10-year savings in excess of half a billion dollars ($503M). In that timeframe, global 

weekly audiences grew 78% (165-278M), all while reducing technology and front office staff 

by over 22%.

Mr. Mendes has also held CXO positions at Special Olympics International, PBS, Pluvita, MRL 

Pharmaceuticals, USAssist and General Health Inc.

Mr. Mendes received his MBA and BS in Management of Information Systems from University 

of Maryland Global Campus and an Associate Degree in Biology from Montgomery College. 

Mr. Mendes also holds certificates in finance and international management from MIT and 

Antwerp University.

Mr. Mendes is a member of the CIO Hall of Fame (Class of 2021), a recipient of the 2011 

Milton F. Clogg Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award from Montgomery College, the Chair 

Elect of the Capitol Technology University Board of Trustees and has receive multiple industry 

awards including an MIT award for IT Innovation, a 2020 Top 150 Global Transformation 

Executives from Constellation Research, 2020 and 2021 FedScoop 50 Federal Leadership 

Awards, 2020 and 2021 50 Best Bsses In Federal IT, the 2005 Technology Leadership Award 

from Broadcasting and Cable Magazine and the Top 100 Hispanic Executives in IT Award every 

year between 2009 and 2019.

Open Security Controls Assessment Language 2022

SPEAKERS’ BIOS
 Dr. Michaela Iorga

 Senior Security Lead for Cloud 

 OSCAL Strategic Outreach Director

 CSD/ITL/NIST

Dr. Michaela Iorga serves as senior security technical lead for cloud computing with the 

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Computer Security Division. She also 

serves as the Strategic Outreach Director for the Open Security Controls Assessment 

Language (OSCAL) project and chairs the NIST Cloud Computing Public Security and 

Forensics Working Groups. 

Having previously served in a wide range of consulting positions in both, government and 

private sector industries, Dr. Iorga has a deep understanding of cybersecurity, risk 

assessment and information assurance for cloud, fog and IoT systems. In her role at NIST, Dr. 

Iorga supports the development and dissemination of cybersecurity standards and 

guidelines that meet national priorities and promote American innovation and industrial 

competitiveness. 

Aligned with NIST’s mission, Dr. Iorga’s work particularly focuses on collaborating with 

industry, academia, and other government stakeholders on developing a high-level, vendorneutral cloud, fog and IoT security and forensics guidance. Dr. Iorga received her Ph.D. from 

Duke University in North Carolina, USA.

 David Waltermire

Standards and Outreach for Security Automation

OSCAL Technical Director

CSD/ITL/NIST

David Waltermire is the lead for Standards and Outreach for the Security Automation 

Program and the Technical Director for the OSCAL project at NIST. He has been a significant 

contributor to the National Vulnerability Database, Security Content Automation Protocol, 

Continuous Monitoring and other security automation projects. Prior to joining NIST, he 

worked as a security consultant advancing security automation capabilities within the 

government sector. His background is in systems and network operations for internet 

service providers and also working as a software engineer designing and developing 

distributed systems. His research experience includes incident handling, continuous 

monitoring, vulnerability/misconfiguration identification, reporting, categorization and 

remediation.

Zach Baldwin

FedRAMP Program Manager for 

Authorization Innovation

FedRAMP/GSA

Zach Baldwin is the FedRAMP Program Manager for Authorization Innovation and leads 

several projects focused on increasing authorization transparency, reciprocity, and helping 

agencies maximize and effectively deploy their cyber security resources. Prior to joining 

FedRAMP, Zach served as the Project Manager for OMB's government-wide Federal Data 

Center Consolidation Initiative. Zach began his federal career at GSA and has an extensive 

background in the organization having worked in the Federal Acquisition Service, the Public 

Building Service, the Office of Citizen Services, and the Office of the CIO. Zach is a graduate of 

Penn State University.
Tom Volpe Sr.

CEO

VITG Inc.

Tom Volpe Sr. is the Chief Executive Officer of VITG, INC. Mr. Volpe has over 26 years of 

commercial industry and government experience in systems security and program management 

in information assurance. In addition, Mr. Volpe has extensive experience in software 

development projects. Mr. Volpe has been working with the GSA FedRAMP Automation team 

for over 2 years with a focus on OSCAL and its uses to gain efficiencies in the FedRAMP ATO 

process. He has developed multiple automation tools for use by internal agency review team 

members. He has been responsible for the development of Secure Coding Initiatives (SCI) and 

Secure System Lifecycle procedures and processes for agencies of the Federal government. He 

has hands-on experience in a variety of programming languages, rapid application development 

tools and database applications. He also has extensive experience as a Senior C&A AIS lead and 

Senior Security Engineer.

Tom led the effort in engineering and development of a full life cycle Certification and 

Accreditation management product that supports government agencies in using technology to 

facilitate all phases of the C & A process. In the commercial sector, Tom was one of the lead 

software architect and software engineer to implement the (DCS) DIAD Control System and 

communications subsystems for the DIAD, (Delivery Information Acquisition Device) a handheld 

device currently in use by UPS drivers worldwide (100,000+) to capture information and 

customer signature images and track deliveries.

Gary Gapinski

SME

Flexion Inc.

Gary Gapinski is a security and XML engineer at Flexion Inc. where he is currently working on a 

GSA 10x FedRAMP automation project using NIST OSCAL. He has worked professionally in 

information technology since 1969, and with XML-related technologies since 2000, with 

particular focus since 2005 on structured document formats designed for security and 

compliance related activities.

Alexander (AJ) Stein

OSCAL SME

CSD/ITL/NIST

Alexander is an application security engineer passionate about the alignment of DevSecOps 

practices and organizations' security and risk strategies for effective information assurance 

and regulatory compliance. 

He has worked for a variety of public sector customers including CMS, GSA, and the US Air 

Force.
Nikita Wootten

OSCAL SME

CSD/ITL/NIST

Nikita Wootten is a computer scientist and researcher at NIST, where he has spent the past 5 

years working on topics such as compliance, blockchain, and network security. Nikita 

graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country in 2021 with a degree in 

Computer Science and a focus in Data Science. With his strong background in AI/ML and NLP, 

Nikita offers a unique perspective when tackling the problems presented in this workshop.

Victoria Yan Pillitteri

FISMA Implementation Team Project Lead

Group Manager

CSD/ITL/NIST

Victoria Yan Pillitteri is a supervisory computer scientist in the Computer Security Division at 

the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Ms. Pillitteri leads the Federal 

Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) Implementation Project, supervising a team 

of technical and administrative staff that are responsible for conducting the research and 

development of the suite of risk management guidance used for managing cybersecurity risk 

in the federal government, and associated stakeholder outreach and public-private 

coordination/collaboration efforts. She serves as the lead of the Joint Task Force working 

group, a partnership with Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community and Civilian 

Agencies to develop a unified security framework to protect USG from cyberattacks and is cochair of the Federal Computer Security and Privacy Forum hosted by NIST. 

She previously worked on development of the Cybersecurity Framework and Privacy 

Framework, led the NIST Smart Grid and Cyber Physical Systems Cybersecurity Research 

Programs, served on the board of directors of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, and 

completed a detail in the office of the NIST Director as an IT policy advisor. She has coauthored a number of NIST Special Publications (SPs) and Interagency Reports (IRs) on 

information security, including SP 800-12, 800-37, 800-53, 800-82, 800-171, 800-171A, 800-

171B, 800-137A, 1108 and IR 7628. 

Victoria holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, a M.S in 

Computer Science, with a concentration in Information Assurance, from the George 

Washington University, completed the Key Executive Leadership Program at American 

University, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). She has 

completed a Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program (SES CDP) and is SES 

certified.

Jasson Walker

President and CEO

cFocus Software Inc.

Mr. Walker is President and CEO of cFocus Software Incorporated and the lead architect for 

cFocus’ FISMA/RMF/FedRAMP compliance automation & reporting solution called Authority 

To Operate (ATO) as a ServiceTM. 

Using OSCAL, ATO as a ServiceTM enables federal government agencies to auto-populate RMF 

& FedRAMP authorization package documents (i.e. SSP, SAP, SAR, POA&Ms, etc.), automate 

the transition from NIST SP 800-53 rev. 4 to rev 5, and perform continuous ATO for their 

systems. With ATO as a ServiceTM, federal government agencies can achieve ‘Optimized’ 

maturity ratings for their annual FISMA IG and CIO Metrics. 

Mr. Walker is a decorated cybersecurity and cloud expert with over a dozen cyber & cloud 

certifications, including: CMMC-AB Registered Practitioner (RP), Certified Information 

Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Certified Penetration 

Tester (CPT), Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE), Microsoft Certified Solutions 

Developer (MCSD), and Project Management Professional (PMP). Mr. Walker also has a Pure 

Mathematics degree from Dartmouth College.
Robert Wood

CISO

CMS/HHS

Robert Wood is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for the Centers for Medicare and 

Medicaid Services (CMS). He leads enterprise cyber security, compliance, privacy, and 

counterintelligence functions at CMS and ensures the Agency complies with secure IT 

requirements while encouraging innovation. 

Mr. Wood has over 10 years of experience in information technology, information security and 

management consulting. 

As information technology has grown more complex with the advent of innovative 

technologies that enable rapid collection, storage and distribution of vast amounts of 

information and data, so too has the importance of safeguarding the privacy of health and 

other sensitive information collected by CMS. Our Agency is entrusted with the health 

information of over 100 million Americans, and it is our fundamental responsibility as 

stewards of this information to ensure its confidentiality is protected. Robert leads CMS's 

efforts to ensure we meet the standards of excellence demanded by that stewardship 

responsibility and protect it from bad actors both foreign and domestic. 

Prior to CMS, Mr. Wood has built and managed several security programs in the technology 

sector. He was also formerly a Principal Consultant for Cigital where he advised enterprises 

about their software security programs. He also founded and led the red team assessment 

practice with Cigital, focused on holistic adversarial analysis, helping organizations identify and 

manage risks from alternative perspectives.

Mr. Wood has a B.S. in Information Management & Technology from Syracuse University.

Anca Sailer

Senior Technical Staff, Master Inventor

IBM Research

Dr. Anca Sailer is currently a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor in IBM 

Research where she develops the next generation of digitized compliance. Dr. Sailer received 

her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Sorbonne Universités, France and applied her Ph.D. work

to Bell Labs before joining IBM Research in 2003. In IBM she was the lead architect for the 

automation of the IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise Business Support Services which earned her 

the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award. 

Dr. Sailer holds over five dozen patents, has co-authored numerous publications in IEEE and 

ACM refereed journals and conferences, and co-edited three books on network and IT 

management topics. Her interests include hybrid cloud business and develops management, 

compliance digitization, and multiomics. She is a Senior Member of IEEE and an aspiring 46er.

 Vikas Agarwal, PhD

Senior Researcher

IBM Research

Dr. Vikas Agarwal is a Senior Researcher at IBM Research, India. He has more than 20 years 

of experience in diverse areas such as Cloud Computing, Cognitive and AI, Mobile 

Computing, Web Services and Semantic Web, etc. His current interests are in the area of 

Cloud Security and Compliance, where he is simplifying and automating compliance for 

Cloud. Dr. Agarwal has published more than 25 papers in top conferences and journals and 

has filed over two dozen patents.
Lou DeGenaro

Senior Engineer

IBM Research

Lou DeGenaro is a Senior Engineer at IBM Research who’s worked on projects over 40+ 

years around the distributed processing theme including compliance standardization and 

automation, Watson Heath EMR scheduler/dispatcher, Jeopardy! Challenge, super computer 

for DoD, DFSMS data migration facility, MPIF/6000, System S, WebSphere, Distributed 

Directory VM/370 in Python, C, C++, Java, javascript, APL, PLAS and VM/370 Assembler. He’s 

received many awards and been granted 30+ US patents.

Dr. Jesus Luna Garcia

Governance Enterprise-IT (C/IDS-GE)

 Robert Bosch GmbH

Prof. Dr. Jesus Luna Garcia, holds a PhD in Computer Architecture from the “Technical 

University of Catalonia” (UPC, Spain 2008), and was a postdoctoral researcher both with the 

CoreGRID NoE (Greece/Cyprus, 2008-2009) and the Technical University of Darmstadt 

(Germany, 2011-2016). He has more than 25 years of experience in the IT security field, 

working with both public and private sector, in America and Europe. 

Jesus Luna has co-authored more than 50 publications including peer-reviewed scientific 

papers, international standards, and a patent. Currently, he works as senior cloud security 

expert with Robert Bosch GmbH (Germany), holds a professorship with the International 

University of Applied Sciences (Germany), and is member of the working group developing 

the new European Union Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services (EUCS). His 

topics of interest include security certification, security automation, trust management, and 

cloud/IoT security.

Matthew Donkin

SME

AWS

Matthew has 12 years of Information Security experience and currently works for AWS on 

the U.S. Customer Engagement team assisting customers with compliance challenges.

Matthew is currently heading AWS’ efforts to bring OSCAL tooling into authorization and 

security documentation process.

Douglas Boldt

Solution Architect

AWS

Douglas is a customer focused IT professional with over 30 years of experience in enterprise 

IT operations, infrastructure technology strategy, service delivery, and application support. 

Douglas is currently a Solutions Architect, supporting NIST as a member of AWS’s U.S. 

Department of Commerce dedicated account team.
Ramon Burks

CSS Assistant Director

CSAM, Department of Justice

Mr. Burks currently serves as the Department of Justice (DOJ) Cybersecurity Services Staff 

(CSS) Assistant Director. In this position, he leads the cybersecurity programs which support 

DOJ Components and other Federal Agencies with services including Continuous Diagnostics 

and Mitigation (CDM), security architecture, Cyber Security Assessment and Management 

(CSAM), and Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM).

Adam Oline

Technical Lead

CyberBalance LLC

CSAM, Department of Justice

Mr. Oline is an employee of CyberBalance, LLC, supporting the Department of Justice as 

Technical Lead on the Cyber Security Assessment and Management (CSAM) team. He has 

been working with the CSAM application for over 15 years, from its early days as an internal 

DOJ Access Database application helping organize NIST SP 800-26 self-assessments to its 

current iteration as a robust GRC web application used by DOJ and 28 other Federal

Agencies to help automate Security Assessment and Authorization documentation and

reporting based on the latest NIST SP 800-53 control catalog.

Jaya Ramanathan, PhD

Chief Security and Governance Architect

Red Hat

Dr. Jaya Ramanathan is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security and Governance 

architect within Red Hat. She has held Chief Architect roles for a variety of security aspects

such as identity and access management, audit logging and reporting, data loss prevention, 

and cloud platform security, compliance, and governance. Her current area of focus is multi 

cluster automated policy-based governance for open hybrid cloud. She has authored many 

blogs, been a panelist in industry conferences, and is actively involved in open-source 

upstream communities about this topic.

Jim Bugwadia

CEO

Nirmata

Jim Bugwadia has more than 20 years of experience building and leading effective teams 

and has created software that powers communications systems. Prior to co-founding and 

becoming CEO of Nirmata, Jim was among the original architects and business leaders within 

Cisco’s cloud automation practice, where he helped grow revenues to over $250M and IDC 

recognized the practice as #1 in global cloud services. Prior to his work at Cisco, Jim led 

engineering teams at startups including Pano Logic, a desktop virtualization startup; Trapeze 

Networks, a wireless pioneer; and Jetstream Communications, a telecom equipment 

manufacturer.
Robert Ficcaglia

CTO

SunStone Secure

Robert Ficcaglia is the CTO at SunStone Secure and a veteran software and IT executive with 

over 25 years experience delivering software and hardware solutions in highly regulated 

verticals including Healthcare, Banking, Payments and Government. Robert has architected 

and delivered multiple secure cloud systems, each serving >1B users. Robert co-chairs the 

Kubernetes Policy Workgroup and leads CNCF and Kubernetes project assessments and 

audits as a member of the Kubernetes SIG-Security and CNCF TAG-Security and advises 

several government agencies and private industry groups as an invited open source and 

cloud native security subject matter expert.

Adam Brand

Managing Director

KPMG

Adam Brand has dedicated over 20 years to providing cybersecurity and technology 

consulting services across a wide variety of domains and has extensive experience in third 

party security and third-party risk management (TPRM). From spending time as an onsite 

assessor to building scalable assessment programs, Adam’s experience spans the full range 

of activities associated with TPRM. His industry experience in TPRM includes healthcare, 

financial services, retail, and media. He also has extensive experience with TPRM in 

regulatory contexts, including significant experience with payment card industry (PCI) third 

party risk management. Adam is an active speaker and organizer at a variety of conferences, 

including RSAC, BSides Las Vegas, DEF CON Biohacking Village, IIA, ISACA, ISSA, THOTCON, 

HOPE, and others.

Thomas Nash

Director

KPMG

Tom Nash is a Director in KPMG's Cyber Security Services practice and serve as the global colead for Cyber Performance Improvement Engineering. He specializes in cyber program 

design and implementation, cyber risk governance, security and operational strategy, cyber 

resilience, cyber regulatory compliance, and third party security. 

Alongside client delivery, Tom is actively involved in advancing the cybersecurity profession. 

Tom has taught postgraduate classes (guest lecturing at Fordham University) and published 

numerous white papers (including “The case for framework harmonization” and “Third party 

security continuous assessments and monitoring: Expanding and enriching the use of data 

within the assessment process”).
Vikas Khosla

Chief Digital Health Officer

Intraprise Health

Vikas Khosla has worked in the healthcare technology sector since 1999 driven by a personal

and professional passion to advance the experience of patients by transforming our national

healthcare system. His focus areas have been Security, Privacy and Compliance (SPC), care

transformation and digital health innovation. Throughout his career, Vikas has worked 

closely with CIOs, CISOs, technology teams, federal legislators and industry peers across the

healthcare ecosystem including hospitals and health systems, health plans, life sciences and

healthcare technology companies on various initiatives that leverage innovative and secure

technology solutions. He has held several business leadership roles, actively participates in

healthcare technology advocacy groups and associations, launched a national innovation

showcase for healthcare technology startups in collaboration with HHS’s Office of the 

National Coordinator (ONC), fosters thought leadership through articles, blog posts, social 

media and, most recently, the launch of a video podcast series focused on cybersecurity and 

digital health. Since 2018, Vikas has served as Intraprise Health’s Chief Digital Health Security 

Officer. In his role, Vikas works closely with CISOs and CIOs to advance organization specific 

and industrywide cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance capabilities through the 

implementation

of standards-based risk management programs and platforms. As a strategic business 

leader, Vikas directs the company’s focus on accelerating compliance and risk management

capabilities, as well as, optimizing engagement with healthcare consumers through 

innovative digital health solutions. Prior to his current role, Vikas served as CEO of BluePrint 

Healthcare IT(BluePrint), a 100% healthcare-focused services and software company which 

he founded in2009. BluePrint’s SPC division provided HIPAA compliance solutions, NIST and 

HITRUST cybersecurity and privacy framework adoption, secure Cloud migrations and 

consulting services that matured its clients risk and threat management capabilities. 

BluePrint was recognized by KLAS as one of the premier SPC companies in healthcare 

achieving KLAS’s top sector rating in2017. BluePrint’s care coordination division, Care 

Navigator, developed and deployed a transformative software platform which is currently 

utilized across several major US regions to coordinate and manage the care of millions of 

underserved patients and their families. While at BluePrint, Vikas and his team collaborated 

with ONC to launch the non-profit “Innovation Summit Series” which held several showcases 

across the US to match digital health and SPC startup companies with health systems and 

health plans seeking to implement innovative and disruptive solutions.

Conner Phillippi

Senior Compliance Solution Manager,

Product Manager

Secureframe

Current Employer: Secureframe

Title(s): Senior Compliance Solutions Manager; Product Manager

Execute on product, strategy, go-to-market, and operations

Former Employer (1): Coalfire

Title: Cybersecurity Consultant

Led cyber strategy, cloud security, incident response, privacy, and regulatory-related client 

engagements

Former Employer (2): DayBlink Consulting

Title Management Consultant

Advised companies on various cybersecurity initiatives
Apostolos Delis

Software Engineer

Secureframe

Current Employer: Secureframe

Title(s): Software Engineer

Write software for third party integrations, cloud infrastructure scanning, and multi-device 

management

Former Employer (1): Tubular Labs

Title: Data Engineering Intern

Led efforts to aggregate social media video analysis by topics and helped renew a contract 

with Viacom

Former Employer (2): Amazon

Title: Software Development Engineering Intern

Helped develop, maintain, and test machine learning models to accurately price Amazon 

products

Dr. Wendell Piez

OSCAL SME

CSD/ITL/NIST

Wendell Piez is a computer scientist at National Institute of Standards and 

Technologies specializing in data modeling and data transformations. Trained in the 

humanities at Yale College (BA 1984) and Rutgers University (PhD 1991), he became 

conversant with emerging standards in electronic text encoding from the early 1990s. Starting 

in 1994 he worked at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, a joint project at 

Rutgers and Princeton Universities, where he pioneered development with SGML (Standard 

Generalized Markup Language) in applications to the electronic publication and study of 

textual data in literature, history and cultural studies. In 1998 Dr Piez joined Mulberry 

Technologies Inc., a private consultancy active in the emerging field of markup languages on 

the Internet. While at Mulberry, he became recognized for his expertise in XML, XSLT and 

related technologies and standards, contributing design and demonstrations for customers 

and community initiatives including conference series (Extreme Markup Languages 2001-2007; 

then Balisage: the Markup Conference 2008-current). Since its founding in 2008, Dr Piez has 

served as General Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly, a leading online journal in digital 

humanities. From 2012 until 2018 Dr Piez worked as an independent consultant; among his 

initiatives during this period were JATSKit (an open-source software library for working with 

data using NISO JATS XML) and XSweet, an open-source format converter (sponsored by the 

Coko Foundation) for extracting data from MS Word docx format into HTML. In 2018, he 

joined NIST ITL, where he contributes to R&D efforts in data modeling and information 

interchange of systems security data including OSCAL (the Open Security Controls Assessment 

Language).

Ray Gauss

Director of Innovation

Easy Dynamics

As a technologist keen on Agile, cloud-native development, leveraging standards, and 

embracing open-source, Ray Gauss looks to cultivate opportunities for accelerators and 

product development at Easy Dynamics and has a track record of working with and 

contributing to open standards like IPTC, ODRL, CMIS, OIDC, and now OSCAL. Ray spends the 

rest of his time enjoying life with his family, cooking, and performing music.
Gaurav (GP) Pal

Principal

StackArmor

GP is subject matter expert in driving cloud adoption and implementing NIST security 

standards for FedRAMP, FISMA and DFARS/CMMC compliance. He has received the Fed 100 

and GCN Rising Star awards in 2015 and 2011 for Cloud ATO’s.

Martin Rieger

Chief Solution Officer

StackArmor

Mr. Rieger supports all FedRAMP, FISMA/RMF and CMMC projects for both Commercial 

and Federal Agencies. Mr. Rieger has supported multiple 3PAO’s and has over 20 years of 

progressive information systems experience including active duty with the US Navy.

Max Aulakh

Managing director

Ignyte Assurance Platform

Max Aulakh is the managing director at Ignyte Assurance Platform. He started his career in the 

US Air Force and spent the majority of his time in the Middle East during his enlistment. He 

brings 15+ years of hands-on working experience from global enterprises on automating risk 

management and cyber security frameworks. Prior to working with the commercial sector, he 

focused on automating traditional A&A packages under DITSCAP and DIACAP frameworks. His 

team was responsible for executing 100+ ATOs on various types of classified and unclassified 

government networks. His work currently focuses on automating the risk management 

framework through the use of language analysis for commercial enterprises struggling with 

cloud and FedRAMP compliance. His experience is formally supplemented by graduate-level 

education in business with an undergraduate in systems security and computer science from

American Military University. Max enjoys cloud engineering and helping compliance 

professionals adopt to modern agile compliance principles. When he is not working, Max 

enjoys spending time with his wife Farah and three kids in Ohio.

Valinder Mangat

CIO

DRT Strategy

Valinder Mangat is the Chief Innovation Officer at DRT Strategies Inc. supporting the Idea Lab, 

where we leverage emerging technologies to solve customer business problems. Valinder is a 

30-year veteran in the Information Technology systems implementation for various 

Government Agencies and Fortune 100 clients. With a diverse experience in implementation 

of enterprise systems, Valinder brings a unique perspective preparing organizations for OSCAL 

adoption.
Travis Howerton

Co-Founder and CTO

 RegScale

As co-founder and chief technology officer of RegScale, Travis Howerton is responsible for 

product development and R&D for our continuous compliance automation platform. 

RegScale is focused on eliminating paper and helping organizations achieve an always audit 

ready posture with real-time risk and compliance management. Prior to joining RegScale, 

Howerton served as the global director for strategic programs within Bechtel Corporation 

and was the Bechtel lead for the merger, cost savings and transformation programs at 

Consolidated Nuclear Security. Prior to joining Bechtel, Howerton had a long and diverse 

career consisting of senior executive assignments throughout the U.S. Department of 

Energy. He served as the Deputy Director for the IT Services Division at Oak Ridge National 

Laboratory, Chief Technology Officer for the National Nuclear Security Administration and 

as Chief Information Officer for Y-12. Howerton holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Organizational 

Management from Tusculum College and a Master’s Degree in Computer Information 

Systems from Boston University. He holds multiple certifications, including the CISSP, ITIL, 

PMP, Scrum Master, Harvard Credential of Readiness and AWS Certified Developer. He is an 

accomplished public speaker, has authored or been cited in over 50 publications and 

supports multiple non-profit associations and educational institutions by serving as a board 

member. 

Jet Ryan

XACTA Solution Architect

Telos

Jet is a Solution Architect for Xacta360 and has supported Telos in variety of roles which 

have had helped him establish a strong foundational understanding of cybersecurity and 

cloud. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor of Science in Computer 

Engineering. Jet began his career at Telos four years ago supporting cybersecurity research 

and development, since then he has gained experience and knowledge across a variety of 

compliance frameworks, disruptive technologies, networking protocols, encryption 

schemes, and system architectures. Jet has been instrumental in supporting Xacta’s 

adoption of OSCAL.