Cybersecurity and Privacy Professionals Conference Call for Proposals

This track focuses on the people side of cybersecurity and privacy, where culture, communication, education, and creativity intersect to reduce human risk and build institutional defenses. Sessions will explore strategies for designing and delivering awareness programs, training initiatives, and human-centric interventions that resonate across campus and extend into our communities.

Discover how to deliver training and campaigns that promote secure behavior, and build a culture where responsibility is shared, not mandated. Sessions will cover topics such as security awareness campaigns, phishing and social engineering training, using generative AI, addressing insider threat, newsletters and campaigns, behavioral metrics and program assessment, security culture gamification, engagement strategies, privacy literacy, creative events and communications, and extending security awareness into community and personal contexts.

This track addresses the critical intersection of governance structures, regulatory compliance, and risk management in higher education. Sessions explore effective governance models that drive strategic alignment, accountability, and data-informed decision-making. Participants will examine responsible AI policy adoption, ensuring institutional data protection while advancing innovation.

The compliance component addresses diverse regulatory requirements, including FERPA, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, regulated research, export controls, and CUI. Practical guidance covers auditing practices, breach notification, and managing compliance across complex digital infrastructures.

Risk management sessions focus on cybersecurity risks, third-party vendor assessment, cloud service security, and supply chain risk, providing actionable frameworks for how risk assessment informs threat mitigation. Attendees from all institutional roles will gain strategies to strengthen governance, ensure compliance, calculate risk, and build programs that support the mission of higher education in an evolving regulatory landscape.

This track explores the leadership skills and strategies needed to build, sustain, and advance cybersecurity and privacy as institutional functions that span the entire fabric of higher education. Sessions examine how to secure resources, measure return on program investments, build effective teams, influence key stakeholders, build community and connection across institutions, and position security and privacy as enablers of institutional success.

Discover how to build high-performing teams in resource-constrained environments, support the mental health and well-being of cybersecurity and privacy professionals, lead remote and distributed teams effectively, and secure executive buy-in for critical initiatives. Sessions address organizational change management, cross-functional collaboration, developing security culture, advocating for resources, building strategic partnerships, and demonstrating how cybersecurity and privacy functions influence and support all areas of campus, from academics to research to student services.

This track explores technical strategies and operational improvements that enhance the effectiveness of cybersecurity operations and privacy programs through automation, streamlined processes, and innovative implementations. Attendees will discover practical approaches to consolidate security tool functionalities, improve visibility across their environment, and optimize day-to-day operations, from managing data inventory and privacy impact assessments to incident response and threat detection.

Presenters will share how they streamlined incident response workflows, automated request handling, managed alert fatigue, enabled credential rotation and secrets management, deployed infrastructure as code, updated asset inventories and SBOMs, and leveraged community resources and open-source solutions to drive cost-effective innovation. Sessions include case studies showcasing successful implementations and lessons learned. Topics also include student-powered security operations centers, integrating AI into security and privacy operations, optimizing detection and response pipelines, and adopting technical workflows that address the unique operational challenges of higher education environments.

This track provides technical deep dives into the evolving threat landscape and advanced defensive architectures for higher education. Designed for anyone seeking to understand how sophisticated attacks work and how to defend against them, sessions explore cutting-edge attack vectors, including AI-powered attacks, adversarial machine learning, ransomware evolution, and advanced persistent threats, alongside sophisticated defense mechanisms.

Attendees will examine zero trust architecture, privacy-enhancing technologies, secure AI/ML systems, post-quantum cryptography, secure enclaves, endpoint device management, and proactive intrusion and data loss detection strategies. Sessions explore lateral movement detection and prevention, indicators of compromise, kill chain analysis, penetration testing methodologies, threat hunting, threat intelligence, secure software development practices, data loss prevention, advanced persistent threats, mitigating zero-day and critical vulnerabilities, examining breaches for lessons learned, and architectural design patterns that balance open collaboration with robust protection.

Show your peers how you get work done. Demonstrations walk attendees through examples of tools, workflows, and operational approaches you've successfully deployed at your institution. This is your opportunity to give colleagues a clear view of what implementation actually looks like and what it looks like when security and privacy programs meet the day-to-day realities of higher education. Whether you're walking through a workflow you've refined, demonstrating a tool you've configured for your environment, or illustrating how you've operationalized your controls, the goal is to give attendees something concrete they can apply at their own institutions. These will be either 30-minute or 45-minute sessions. You may have a maximum of two presenters for this session type.

Lead a conversation that matters. Facilitated discussions bring colleagues together around timely topics, emerging challenges, and questions that lack established playbooks. These sessions work when you have a challenge that needs multiple perspectives and lived experiences from different institutional contexts. This is your opportunity to tap into the collective wisdom of the community. These will be either 30-minute or 45-minute sessions. You may have a maximum of two facilitators for this session type.

These sessions are opportunities to share topics of interest, lessons learned, foresight, or evidence of impact related to a conference theme. Presenters, whether one person or a group, should include ways to actively engage the audience in the session. If you are proposing a panel, it should represent two or more opposing viewpoints for a lively group discussion. The best panels and group presentations have diversity in perspective, opinion, and representation and the most interesting sessions are often ones that offer many different perspectives. These will be either 30-minute or 45-minute sessions. You may have a maximum of four presenters/panelists for this session type.

Posters give participants and presenters the opportunity to share and examine problems, issues, and solutions in a casual, personal environment. Poster presenters are expected to engage with individuals, either one-on-one or in small groups, for short periods of time throughout the time slot allocated. Presenters will use a physical poster display to visually present their topics. There will be multiple poster sessions happening at the same time, allowing for attendees to visit many posters and peruse the various topics. These will be 45-minutes. You may have a maximum of two presenters for this session type.