Baylor University

Founded in 1845, Baylor University is a private Research 1 institution in Waco, Texas, serving more than 20,000 students drawn from all 50 states and over 90 countries. The university's cybersecurity operations sit within a higher-education environment where the threat surface spans research data, student records, financial systems, and clinical infrastructure - a blend of targets that demands defense-in-depth and institutional fluency across compliance regimes like FERPA, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. Security teams at Baylor navigate the challenges typical of large academic networks: a transient user population, sprawling endpoints across labs and residence halls, federated identity management, and the constant pressure to enable open research while hardening perimeter controls. The work involves securing cloud and on-premises infrastructure, managing vulnerability lifecycles, monitoring for lateral movement across segmented networks, and supporting incident response at enterprise scale. The university integrates its mission-driven culture - rooted in the motto Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana, Pro Mundo - with a commitment to developing talent. Cybersecurity roles here require operational rigor and the ability to communicate risk to non-technical stakeholders across academic, administrative, and clinical units. For practitioners looking to defend a complex, mission-critical environment without the opacity of vendor land, Baylor offers a clearly scoped threat model and an institutional mandate to get it right.