By Sunny Nwankwo

In an era where cyberattacks cost businesses billions annually and data breaches make headlines weekly, one cybersecurity professional is taking an unconventional approach to strengthening America’s digital defenses: bringing people together.

When the second annual IEEE Baltimore Technical Colloquium opens its doors on November 15, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, hundreds of engineers, researchers, and public officials from across the Mid-Atlantic region will gather under the theme “Innovation and Leadership in Emerging Technologies.” The conference, which will feature keynote addresses from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab’s Chief 5G Strategist, NIST senior scientists, Northrop Grumman executives, and IEEE Region 2 leadership, has grown significantly since its 2024 debut. 

Among the key organisers is Modupe Temidayo, serving as Local Organizing Chair after leading the technology track at last year’s inaugural event, a Nigerian professional whose journey to cybersecurity leadership took a path few would have predicted.

Modupe Temidayo, Local Organizing Chair of the IEEE Baltimore Technical Colloquium and a graduate student in Information Assurance at Bowie State University, believes that the future of cybersecurity depends not just on technology, but on the communities we build around it. Temidayo explains from her office in Baltimore. “But the most critical component is often overlooked: the human element. Technology is only as strong as the people who implement it, understand it, and champion it.”

Temidayo’s journey into cybersecurity leadership began in Nigeria, where she spent seven years at Globacom Telecommunications detecting fraud and mitigating security risks in recharge card systems. It was there, managing customer disputes and analyzing cyber threats, that she first recognized a pattern that would shape her career philosophy.

“I noticed that most security breaches weren’t purely technical failures,” she recalls. “They happened because of gaps in communication, lack of awareness, or insufficient collaboration between different teams and departments. The technology existed to prevent these incidents, but the human infrastructure wasn’t there.”That realization led Temidayo to pursue advanced studies in information assurance in the United States and to become increasingly involved in professional organizations that bridge technical expertise with community engagement. As a member of IEEE and chapter President of Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS), she has positioned herself at the intersection of technology and professional development.

Her role as Technical Track lead for the inaugural IEEE Baltimore Technical Colloquium in November 2024 represented the culmination of this philosophy. The event brought together industry experts, researchers, and professionals across multiple technical tracks, that created essential knowledge-sharing ecosystems.Technical colloquia serve a unique and increasingly vital role in the cybersecurity landscape. Unlike traditional conferences focused solely on presenting research or vendor exhibitions centered on product sales, colloquia create intimate environments where practitioners share real-world challenges, emerging threats, and innovative solutions.

This collaborative approach directly addresses what Temidayo identifies as one of cybersecurity’s most pressing challenges: the rapid evolution of threats outpacing the dissemination of defensive knowledge. Ransomware variants emerge weekly, social engineering techniques grow more sophisticated daily, and artificial intelligence is creating entirely new attack vectors that few organizations understand.

Temidayo’s work extends beyond organizing events. Her published articles in Nigeria’s Vanguard and The Sun newspapers tackle practical cybersecurity challenges that affect everyday citizens, from phishing scams to data protection as a shared responsibility. This focus on public education reflects another core belief: cybersecurity cannot be the exclusive domain of technical experts.

“I’ve written about phishing scams not because they’re technologically sophisticated; they’re actually quite simple,” Temidayo says. “I write about them because they’re devastatingly effective. The Nigerian prince email scams of the 2000s have evolved into highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns that trick even security-conscious individuals. The weakest link in any security system is an uninformed user.”