Lauryn Williams most recently served as Chief of Staff in the Defense Industrial Base Policy Office at the Pentagon and previously as Director for Strategy in the White House Office of the National Cyber Director.    

Achieving concrete policy change requires creativity and entrepreneurship, particularly in new and emerging technology areas. In this discussion, Lauryn will describe how she navigated her experiences at the forefront of defense industrial base policy implementation and in creating a new space cybersecurity portfolio at the White House that relied on deep collaboration with industry and academia and painstaking federal government policy discussions. In January 2025, this work led to President Biden including new minimum cybersecurity baseline requirements for government space operators in his final cybersecurity executive order. The White House also released a report capturing takeaways from a technical workshop series that lays the groundwork for future actions the current Administration can take to tackle cyber threats to space.