The University of Washington, founded in 1861, operates across the Seattle, Bothell, and Tacoma campuses in the Puget Sound region. It is a public research institution that receives more federal research funding than any other U.S. public university, with 189 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on staff. The university educates more than 60,000 students annually across over 180 undergraduate majors and more than 300 graduate degree programs.
Cybersecurity work at UW spans a complex threat landscape: protecting a major academic medical center, safeguarding federally funded research data, and defending infrastructure that supports active domains in medicine, engineering, and computer science. The attack surface is broad - clinical systems, research computing clusters, student and faculty identity management, and the interconnections between them all.
The stakes are concrete. UW's research enterprise involves sensitive datasets, IP-intensive collaborations, and compliance requirements that demand rigorous security engineering. Staff operate in an environment where the network perimeter is inherently porous - tens of thousands of users, distributed campuses, and a culture of open academic exchange - so the security posture has to assume breach and focus on detection, segmentation, and rapid response rather than perimeter lockdown.
