Chris C. Demchak

Chris C.Demchak holds degrees in engineering, economics and comparative complex organization theory/political science. She holds the US Naval War College’s Grace M. Hopper Chair of Cyber Security and is a senior cyber scholar at the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute (CIPI) - formerly the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies (C3S) - which she co-founded and directed. Her research and many publications address global cyberspace as a globally shared, complex, insecure “substrate” penetrating throughout the critical organizations of digitized societies, creating “cybered conflict”, and resulting in a rising “Cyber Westphalia” of sovereign competitive complex socio-technical-economic systems (STESs). She takes a systemic approach in focusing on emergent structures, comparative institutional evolution, adversary/defensive use of systemic cybered tools, virtual worlds/gaming for operationalized organizational learning, and designing systemic resilience against normal or adversary imposed surprises that disrupt or disable largescale systems. 

Having studied the LISP programming language when serving as a military officer, she has taught international security studies and management, comparative organization theory, enterprise information systems, and cybersecurity for international/ national security issues. Recent works include two manuscripts in production tentatively entitled Cyber Westphalia: Redrawing International Economics, Conflict, and Global Structures, and Cyber Command: Understanding National Models as Experiments in National Cyber Defense.