Katrina (Katya) Rosseini

Katya is a visionary strategist and a key driver of cybersecurity innovation. She advises and provides strategic insight to venture capital firms, investment banks, and capital markets to identify and evaluate emerging technologies with the potential for market disruption and national significance. Katya co-founded a cybersecurity company that secures smart devices (IoTs) at the chipset level, implementing security by design to ensure robust protection and safeguarding the device throughout its lifecycle. Katya’s efforts as a co-founder of a cybersecurity startup align with her doctoral research, where she developed an algorithm-based methodology to address exploitable vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure systems, including those for water, power, and essential services, protecting them from nation-state attacks. Her efforts focus on fostering resilience in a connected world, ensuring security evolves alongside technological advancements. Katya completed the course component of her Doctor of Engineering at George Washington University, Cum Laude, and serves on GWU’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) stakeholder committee. She is Head of Healthcare and Innovation at the Ascendant Group, a founding member of the Forbes Agency Council. Katya served on the Board of Directors at St. Rose Hospital for 14 years, chaired the finance/403b committee, secured $16M in funding, and played a key role in the hospital's M&A. She has held Series 7 and 66 securities licenses at UBS Financial Services and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, contributed to ABC10 News and NBC Sacramento, and served as an inter-governmental relations analyst for the California Performance Review under Governor Schwarzenegger. Katya holds a B.A. in Business Organization Studies with a minor in Managerial Economics from UC Davis, an MBA in Finance (Summa Cum Laude) from Colorado Tech University, and completed Harvard Business School’s Accelerating Board Diversity program. She was offered a fellowship to the Herndon Directors Institute, a distinction reflecting her governance expertise. Katya earned a certificate in Blockchain Strategy from Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where she led a healthcare use case, and is currently completing her dissertation to attain her Doctor of Engineering in Cybersecurity in July 2025.