Women at the Forefront of Technology, Policy and Society

Because of the institution’s rich history of expertise in a wide range of fields, those working at and attending Carnegie Mellon University stand at the forefront of technological advancement, social change and a thorough understanding of human impact. They do so by building upon the past to invent — and reinvent — solutions for the problems of today.

Across the university's seven schools and colleges, a number of nationally and internationally recognized faculty members utilize their expertise across technological fields to expand knowledge and improve stability in areas such as national security, privacy and cybersecurity. 

Within renowned institutions like the School of Computer Science(opens in new window), Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences(opens in new window) and College of Engineering(opens in new window), women from CMU are leading intellectual movements that strive to carry humanity toward a safe and prosperous future. 

Three members of the Carnegie Mellon community are taking unique approaches to their work and helping to change the landscape of technology, policy and society: Audrey Kurth Cronin, Nadiya Kostyuk and Virginia Smith.

Audrey Kurth Cronin

Audrey Kurth Cronin(opens in new window) is a renowned strategist and national security expert who has written award-winning books on terrorism and technology. She is also a frequent contributor to national and global publications such as Foreign Affairs, NPR, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The daughter of a Navy family, Cronin has spent much of her life considering issues from a global perspective. As a recipient of the highly competitive Marshall Scholarship(opens in new window), she graduated from Princeton University before earning her master's degree and doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford in the UK.

Her career has explored the intersection of technology, policy and international security — both as an academic and in the U.S. government. Her first job was in the American Embassy in Moscow, where she worked for the U.S. Commercial office, a joint enterprise of the State and Commerce Departments. Later, she worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, writing strategic documents and engaging in program assessments. As an academic, she has been a member of the faculty of Oxford University, American University, and Georgetown University, among other institutions.

In January 2023, Cronin was named the founding director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology(opens in new window) (CMIST).

Cronin recognizes that her route to higher education has been unorthodox, not proceeding through the academic ranks in the typical way but periodically taking time out to serve in government. However, she said that being in environments where policy is executed has given her critical insight into all areas of her work.

"I took some risks with my career because I really felt it was important to understand what it meant to implement the ideas that academics so brilliantly come up with," she said. "I didn't want to just be on the theoretical side; I also wanted to understand what it meant to put ideas into practice."

Cronin would later bring her expertise to the U.S. National War College as a professor, teaching strategy to senior military officers and government employees from across the U.S. government, including the State Department, FBI, DHS, and the intelligence agencies.

Today, as director of CMIST, Cronin explores the intersection between policymaking and political science, on the one hand, and science and engineering on the other.  Her wide-ranging professional experience comes in handy in building intellectual bridges between scientists and strategists at Carnegie Mellon.

Cronin observed that the increasingly complex challenges of governing new technologies for national security demands a comprehensive approach to modern strategy. “Responsible scientists cannot just leave strategy to the policymakers,” she said, “because the things they are building will have deep and lasting strategic effects we must consider in advance.”

"I'm a political scientist and an international relations scholar. But I believe that the connection between political science, international relations and STEM is deeper, more important and more urgent than ever," Cronin said.

As technology becomes a more significant factor — and disruptor — in society and strategy, her advice for graduates and early career faculty members taking their first steps into the field is to carefully develop and husband their ability to focus, especially during times of social and political strain.

"It's crucial not to be caught up in short term distractions and allow your attention to be monopolized by other forces," she said. "Your superpower is your ability to focus. It's not how smart you are. It's not even the things you're learning, although those are important. It's the skill to apply those things in an intensely focused way that’s increasingly scarce. Only if you can build the mental discipline to focus deeply will you fulfill your potential, and build a successful life that benefits others."

Nadiya Kostyuk

Much of what CMIST does requires viewing the cyber landscape as its own geopolitical arena, with all of the complexities and nuances that are required to understand the power dynamics of one. Examining this is the work of Nadiya Kostyuk(opens in new window), an assistant professor who joined Carnegie Mellon in 2024.

Originally from Ukraine, Kostyuk’s expertise is focused on cyber power as a geopolitical tool in the modern world. Before arriving at CMU, she was an assistant professor in the Schools of Public Policy and Cybersecurity and Privacy at Georgia Institute of Technology. Kostyuk's research, which is NSF-sponsored, has since been included in publications such as International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Contemporary Security Policy, Policy & Internet and others.

This research focuses on understanding the role of cyber power and the factors that influence it as increasingly important elements of domestic and international politics and security.

"It was around 2011, when I was in my master's program, that I noticed that Russia had been using cyberspace to shape the domestic and international policies and politics of Eastern European nations. And as somebody coming from the region, I was fortunate enough that I was able to understand and experience the impact of that in my own skin," Kostyuk said. "As I was earning my degree, I realized that there was no discussion and very little academic research about this topic. Moreover, many policy makers who joined this new area did not have any technical or policy background relevant to this area and approached it from the same angle that dealt with things like weapons of mass destruction or nuclear capabilities."

At the time, most experts in the field would take lessons from the history of geopolitical conflict from before and outside the realm of cyberspace to understand it.

"A lot of times they would use them as analogies to explain what is happening in the cyber realm. I found that problematic, because while we cannot enter the discussion of the impact of cyber technologies on geopolitics in a vacuum, applying the old lessons from the past might have been problematic. There was a real need to zoom in on this new area and investigate which lessons might be relevant and which might be irrelevant, dismissing some of the claims that have been made to understand it."

As a solution, Kostyuk has sought to define cyber power as a concept worth studying in its own right: "Mostly, what drives countries or states' decisions to develop different manifestations of cyber capabilities, and what effects it has again domestically and internationally."

Kostyuk also hopes to develop models and standards to improve measurement and understanding of what forms cyber power can take. "Unlike more conventional capabilities, we can't touch it, we can't see it, we can't take an image of it. It's more nuanced in terms of what goes into it and how countries develop it."

As understanding of the field grows and the next generation of political scientists take their first steps into the world of settings, Kostyuk said that the best thing students can do is take advantage of interdisciplinary opportunities whenever possible.

“Because of the world that we live in right now, every single area is very interdisciplinary. And we at Carnegie Mellon are very lucky in the sense that a lot of our majors are designed to be interdisciplinary. A lot of problems need the attention of a lot of different people — political scientists, lawyers, cybersecurity experts — and students will have a huge advantage if they're able to speak to these different groups.”

Virginia Smith

Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab(opens in new window) also brings together experts from across the university to collaborate on cybersecurity research, and to educate future generations of security and privacy professionals.

One of the faculty members who contributes to the work of CyLab is Virginia Smith(opens in new window), who is the Leonardo Associate Professor of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon.

Originally coming from a background in mathematics, Smith would later pursue graduate degrees in computer science. “Around the time I started my Ph.D. program, there was a lot of excitement around big data — the idea was, we have so much of it. How will we process it all, and improve the methods and algorithms that we have for understanding and producing intelligence out of data?”

For much of Smith’s doctoral candidacy, she sought to answer the question of how these methods and algorithms work at small scales, and how to extend them to larger sets of data.

"I started to get really interested in the area of machine learning, which combines concepts from computer science and statistics. I was spending a lot of time thinking about how we can process data at scale,” Smith said. “What’s been kind of funny about my journey is that now what I spend a lot of time on is thinking about how to handle the fact that we actually don't have that much data.” 

The lack of data becomes clear when engineering and interfacing with large language models, which rely on sizable amounts of data to function.

“To build large language models, they're scraping data from the internet, and there's only one Internet. We've pretty much reached the limit of that data. Now we have to be creative about how we're getting high-quality data. For these systems, a lot of this data is coming from people or from multiple organizations. It’s sort of siloed in various ways and there's new issues that arise when trying to gather these additional sources: issues with privacy, with security, with incentivizing people to share their data, and crucially, with understanding what the risks are.”

Today, through her work at CMU, Smith focuses on helping to improve privacy-preserving and secure machine learning. Much of this work looks at how these large sets of data can be used to make existing LLMs safer — for instance, working with organizations like Thorn(opens in new window) to make AI technology less harmful and protect children and other members of society from digital abuse.

She says that while it can be easy to let cynicism overtake curiosity in discussions of artificial intelligence and its usage, the risks associated with unsafe AI mean that it's all the more important for everyone to be involved and defended as these technologies are being developed.

“We need as many voices and perspectives to help build this technology as we can get,” she said. “Things are moving quickly with the field,  and it may seem like they're moving in a way where only a subset of organizations are making progress and controlling all of this technology. I would like to push back on that and encourage people to be involved in all of the remarkable advancements that are happening. We need this in order for the technology to be as useful as possible for society.”

For Women's History Month, Carnegie Mellon is featuring the work of women across the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.