Female Students Awarded Cybersecurity Scholarships

Three women chosen from a large pool of highly qualified candidates are the new recipients of Morphisec's Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship. An independent judge, Limor Elhayani, made the final determinations. Elhayani is vice president of threat engineering at Citi and has herself been the only woman in the room for most of her professional life. In an effort to bring more women into a field where they are severely underrepresented, Netta Schmeidler, VP of product at Morphisec, launched the scholarship program in October 2017. The company offers three scholarships for female students who are pursuing degrees in cybersecurity, information assurance, information security, information systems security and other subdisciplines of computer science. Two prerequisites to eligibility included that the women had to have been enrolled at an accredited academic institution of higher learning during the 2017–2018 school year and that they must be Israeli or US citizens or permanent legal residents of either country. “The cybersecurity field needs more women,” said Schmeidler. “Their diverse voices, viewpoints and opinions help drive innovation, improvement and resilience. Although the latest figures on the number of women in cybersecurity show improvement, we have a long way to go."