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Elizabeth Nichols

Elizabeth Nichols, Ph.D. (aka Betsy) is Co-Founder and CTO of PlexLogic LLC. Over her career, which includes positions as university faculty, civilian government, private enterprise, and several start-ups, she has applied mathematics and computer technologies to create systems for war gaming, space craft mission optimization, industrial process control, network and systems management, and most recently, security metrics. She has started three companies, the most recent being PlexLogic.

The first company that she co-founded was Digital Analysis Corporation (DAC). She sold DAC to Legent in 1994, and Legent was acquired by Computer Associates in 1995. As a result Betsy became one of two principal architects for Unicenter TNG, reporting to CA's CTO. During the four years Betsy was at CA, Unicenter sales ramped from $50M to over $2B.

Betsy's most recent company, PlexLogic, was founded in 2008. PlexLogic offers a cloud-based Metrics On-Demand service called MetricsCenter. MetricsCenter offers both a for-profit security metrics service at www.metricscenter.net as well as an open and free public resource for security metrics at www.MetricsCenter.org. In the area of security metrics, she has helped organize several MetriCon and MetriSEC Workshops, and has contributed chapters on security metrics to three books: Andrew Jaquith's Security Metrics: Replacing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (2007, Addison-Wesley) , Beautiful Security (2009, O'Reilly), and an upcoming book with Caroline Wong to be published by McGraw-Hill. She also works extensively with communities such as the Cloud Security Alliance, SecurityMetrics.org, and BSIMM. Betsy graduated with an A.B. from Vassar College and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Duke University.

Elizabeth Nichols

Elizabeth Nichols