Renata Spinks
Acting Senior Information Security Officer & Cyber Technology Officer, U.S. Marine Corps.
Renata Spinks leads a portfolio focused on IT, policy, investments and cyber operations, while overseeing organizational leadership for the Marine Corps Network and Information Enterprise.
Prior to the Marine Corps, she served in the U.S. Army 44th MEDCOM 28th Combat Support Hospital and is a decorated combat veteran.
She worked for the Department of Homeland Security at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Acquisition and led asset management, budget projection and execution, audit and financial system security.
Her passion for cyber grew when she was a criminal research specialist and used computer forensics and human intelligence to help with human trafficking and child exploitation investigations. She has also served as special assistant to the director of IT in the Office of Financial Research at the U.S. Treasury, and later, was senior advisor to the assistant CIO for the Internal Revenue Service.
Spinks has led the USMC mobile and remote workforce operations design and architecture buildout since 2018, where cybersecurity has been a foundational guide.
Why Watch
According to her bio, Spinks is focused on many cyber-related areas. She works to enable cyber and intelligence-focused compute and store, access control and identity management, data encryption and governance and more. She leads defensive cyber operations for a hybrid cloud environment, creates opportunities for emerging technology for connected and disconnected environments and more.
In a recent Federal News Network panel, Spinks spoke of the Marines’ interest in using artificial intelligence and machine learning to better leverage data for intelligence and decision-making.
“I think artificial intelligence and machine learning investments are going to be very helpful there,” she said then. “Being able to have algorithms that can be trained to understand the repetition that occurs. After that pattern is created, artificial intelligence and machine learning will help us learn all of those repetitious things that we do every day.”