Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, Washington, United States

Elena Peterson joined the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1990 after getting a bachelor’s degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Oregon. She is currently a Senior Cyber Security Research in the Computation and Analytics division. Ms. Peterson has led the research, development, and management of multiple cross-disciplinary, multi-laboratory projects focused in the areas of cyber security, fundamental sciences, and national security. Her work has included research and development of integration computational environments for bioinformatics, physics, computational chemistry, and cyber security. She is currently the principal investigator for the MLSTONES project, which applies algorithms and tools from the biological sciences to create new and innovative solutions to relevant cyber security problems, thus merging two of her main interests. More recently she has become the Program Manager for Cyber.gov which aims to improve the cyber security posture of all departments and agencies in the government. She continues to focus on research and development in major national and cyber security interests as well as maintaining work in the fundamental sciences.