Maria McClelland

Providing cybersecurity and computer support for some of the world’s top nuclear scientists would be a little intimidating for most people, but not for Maria McClelland.

As team leader for the Cyber Security Operations Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she thrives in the technically daunting and fast-moving environment at the science and energy research facility, where she focuses on the lab’s computer and network operations.

“McClelland’s drive for partnership, camaraderie and relentless focus on continuous improvement enables delivery of best-in-class cyber capabilities in support of ORNL’s mission,” Deputy CIO Kris Torgerson said.

Among other activities, McClelland assembled a team of seven analysts and two students who developed and deployed a tiered model for assessing and resolving cyber alerts and computing issues at Oak Ridge. She also deployed a ticketing system that uses consistent terminology so that researchers’ data can be mined for future use, and she worked with the lab’s Cyber and Information Security Research Group to address gaps in commercial tools that needed lab-specific fixes.

Along the way, she adopted open-source tools as a lower-cost alternative to commercial offerings for identifying suspicious behavior on the lab’s networks and developed metrics and generated dashboard reports to track trends in the thousands of cybersecurity issues the center deals with daily. And she accomplished all that in her first year in the job.

Furthermore, Torgerson said McClelland was instrumental in combining the lab’s tactical efforts with those of a world-class cybersecurity research and development team.

“The collaboration between the hard-core research and real-world operations results in incredibly robust, cost-effective and efficient capability than other better staffed and funded organizations,” Torgerson said.

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