Dr. Vanessa Thomas, CIPT (all pronouns), is an award-winning technologist, designer, and researcher with a background that spans computer science, mathematics, privacy engineering, human security, peace building, leadership, feminist studies, and public policy analysis, amongst other topics. During their career, Vanessa has been privileged enough to live and work in Ecuador, Bolivia, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and a couple of provinces in Canada. While Vanessa has worked for the Government of Canada since 2019, they have also maintained a presence in academia. Vanessa teaches part-time with Carleton University's School of Information Technology and sits on the Advisory Board for the National Research Council’s Digital Technology Research Centre; they have also published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers and book chapters.