2016 BASC Speakers

Maysa Akbar
Integrated Wellness Group Dr. Maysa Akbar is a board certified Adolescent and Child Clinical Psychologist having received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Saint Louis University. She completed her preand-post doctoral work at the Yale Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Akbar holds a number of certifications in various areas of treatment. She has spent many years working and consulting with child guidance clinics and Early Head Start programs. She also has comprehensive experience in evaluations and assessments, parent education, consultation, supervision, and training. Additionally, Dr. Akbar provides motivational coaching, leadership development, and trainings on organizational growth and strategy to both small and large businesses around the nation.

Dr. Akbar is the Founder and Executive Director of Integrated Wellness Group (IWG), a diverse, multidisciplinary mental health practice established in New Haven, Connecticut in 2008. IWG has grown from a small therapy practice into a fully functioning outpatient mental/behavioral health office serving approximately 850 patients per year. In the past five years, the staff has grown from 3 to 30, and annual revenue has recently exceeded 1.3 million dollars. Dr. Akbar established IWG in the heart of New Haven in 2008 because she has a passion for providing individualized, comprehensive, and culturally sensitive mental health care to underserved populations. Through the use of innovative, individualized, holistic approaches, Integrated Wellness Group functions as a change agent who collaborates with clients and community partners to clarify and achieve their goals.

IWG has won several business awards, including Small Business of the Year, awarded by the Connecticut Small Business Development Center, the Alumni Merit Award from St. Louis University, the Positive Input Award from Hispanicize and the Trailblazer Award from the Jamaican American Connection. In the past year Dr. Akbar’s achievements have been recognized by the Connecticut State Assembly and by the towns of New Haven, Hamden, and West Haven. She has been vetted by the Greater New England Minority Supplier Development Council (GNEMSDC) as well as the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC).

Dr. Akbar has completed a year-long Community Leadership Program in New Haven through the William Casper Gradstein Memorial Fund. Currently, she has also recently completed the GNEMSDC advanced leadership program (GALP). In the last few years, Dr. Akbar has led leadership trainings and done executive coaching for several New Haven businesses. Dr. Akbar is a leader in the New Haven community and is dedicated to growing leaders both within IWG and in New Haven. She continually encourages her employees to create personal and professional goals and strives to cultivate a trusting work environment that encourages free expression of ideas.

Dr. Akbar believes that every child deserves a chance to be positively influenced by a caring and compassionate adult. To further her mission of positively affecting the lives of at-risk populations, Dr. Akbar helped develop and has implemented an innovative program entitled VETTS (Veterans Empowering Teens Through Support). The VETTS program matches military veteran mentors with juvenile justice system involved youth to provide support, guidance, and empowerment as the youths transition to living positive, healthy, and fulfilling lives. Under her direction, IWG is constantly expanding its services, which includes following the patient centered medical home model of embedding clinicians into several pediatric settings. Her latest effort to expand on the patient centered medical home model is a joint partnership with Oxford Pediatrics. They are two businesses under the umbrella of Oxford Pediatric Wellness Center that addresses both the medical and mental health care of children and families.

Marcin Butkiewicz
Partners Healthcare | Connected Health Innovations Marcin Butkiewicz is a systems architect and senior software engineer at Partners Healthcare | Connected Health Innovations.

Erik Dasque
Constant Contact A Sr Director at Constant Contact, I have recently lead the Docker Working Group here, built the Docker Bootcamp class and have been, on the app development side, pushing Docker & Application Level Metrics (statsd, Graphite, Grafana) to improve DevOps practices wherever I roam.

Casey Dunham
GuidePoint Security Casey Dunham is a Senior Security Consultant in the Application Security Practice at GuidePoint Security where he focuses on web application security, source code review, and developer training, where his 10 years of software development experience comes in handy. Other interests include bourbon, travel, exploit development, and OSINT. Casey holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern Maine and is the current Chapter President of OWASP Maine.

Dennis Hurst
Saltworks Security Mr. Dennis Hurst is on the HP team at Saltworks Security and is a highly respected security expert with unprecedented expertise in the area of application security and the integration of security into all aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennishurst

Matt Morency
Pegasystems This bio is so short, it is already done.

Apoorv Munshi
Northeastern University
 * Candidate for Master of Science in Information Assurance at Northeastern University
 * Former application security intern at Cigital
 * Currently working at Genospace as an application security intern
 * Board member of the ISSA Northeastern University Chapter
 * Conducted a similar workshop at Northeastern University
 * Attendee at OWASP Boston, Boston security meetup, Blackhat USA 2015, DEFCON 23, CircleCityCon 2015, Appsec USA

Nivedita Murthy
Cigital Nivedita Murthy is a Security Consultant at Cigital. She has 7 years of experience in managing information security operations, including application security reviews, proxy and firewall security, infrastructure patch management, and incident response. Her current focus is on vulnerability remediation.

Chris Romeo
Security Journey Chris Romeo is CEO and co-founder of Security Journey. His passion is to bring application security awareness to all organizations, large and small. He was the Chief Security Advocate at Cisco Systems for five years, where he guided Cisco’s Security Advocates, empowering engineers to "build security in" to all products at Cisco. He led the creation of Cisco’s internal, end-to-end application security awareness program launched in 2012. Chris has twenty years of experience in security, holding positions across the gamut, including application security, penetration testing, and incident response. Chris is a sought after conference speaker and holds the CISSP and CSSLP.

Roshan Thomas
Northeastern University Roshan Thomas is a student of Northeastern University currently pursuing his Masters in Information Assurance. He has around 4 years of experience as an Information Security Consultant. He has performed Network, Application and Mobile Application Penetration tests and is also familiar with a number of Enterprise Network and Application security Solutions. He is a SANS GIAC Certified Incident Handler. He is also a bug bounty hunter recognized by IBM (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21987126) and Coinbase.

Tania Ward
EMC Corporation Tania Ward has worked as part of EMC Product Security Response Center for over 3 years. Prior to that, she had worked at Microsoft for just under 14 years working on products from SQL Server, Windows Live to Microsoft Office. In her spare time she volunteers as an EMT in her local town as well as a ski patroller at Wachusett Mountain Ski Resort.

Jeff Williams
Contrast Security A pioneer in application security, Jeff Williams is the founder and CTO of Contrast Security, a revolutionary application security product. Contrast is an application agent that enables software to both report vulnerabilities and prevent attacks. Jeff has over 25 years of security experience, speaks frequently on cutting-edge application security, and has helped secure code at hundreds of major enterprises. Jeff served as the Global Chairman of the OWASP Foundation for eight years, where he created many open-source standards, tools, libraries, and guidelines - including the OWASP Top Ten.

Jim Weiler
Starwood Hotels Application Security Architect at Starwood Hotels for 9 years. Application security manager at Staples for 5 years. Boston OWASP Chapter leader for 12 years. Author and primary editor of OWASP cheatsheet Managing 3rd Party Javascript.