"I think we've kind of become numb as a society to data breaches, like, 'Oh, my information was leaked again.'"
For Chelsea Lovelace, cybersecurity is serious business. Her job, after all, is to analyze cyber threats that exploit data insecurity for nefarious purposes.
"Open source intelligence is real, and it can be used against you," she says. "There are steps you need to take to limit your exposure online."
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Today the twice-graduated alum of University of Cincinnati's College of Education, Criminal Justice, Human Services, and Information Technology (CECH, 2014 B.S. in Criminal Justice; 2022 M.S. in Information Technology) has an important corporate career at a leading defense contractor following years spent in military and police service.
Back in 2011, though, Lovelace was feeling a little lost.
"I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do in life," she explains. "I was going to Miami University up in Middletown, a satellite location." Some of her friends were UC students, though, prompting Lovelace to schedule a tour to check out the university, which made an immediate impact. "I just absolutely fell in love with the campus."
Lovelace enrolled at UC undecided on a major, then she spent time studying nursing. Soon enough, though, campus connections led her to the halls of the Teachers-Dyer Complex, where she would go on to find her academic home. "I met some people who were in the military and doing the Criminal Justice route," she explains. "I took a couple of those classes and absolutely fell in love with the instructors. I decided that was the route I wanted to go." She points to professor emeritus Sue Bourke, a cornerstone of the program for 37 years, as a decisive influence. "I fell in love with her style of teaching and just her life story. That really helped seal the deal, if you will."
Curriculum covered in the program held personal connections, too, as she herself knows too well the pain criminal activities cause families. The child of a man who struggled for years with addiction, Lovelace lost her father during her senior year of high school to an accidental overdose of doctor-prescribed morphine.
Initially, she planned to pursue a career as a police officer (she admits to being inspired by the TLC documentary show, "Police Women of Cincinnati") and did her undergraduate co-op work with the Cincinnati Police Department's (CPD) Youth Services Section, which she describes as "challenging." "I talked to them about my experience being in the military. Hopefully I got through to some of them." But her military service-a 12-year chapter as of this writing-ended up setting her trajectory in a slightly different direction (though, incidentally, in a role with the Cincinnati Police Department).
Lovelace joined the Army National Guard in 2012, providing six years of service before signing another six-year contract with the Air National Guard, a term that ended earlier this year. During this time (and after graduating with a Criminal Justice B.S.), she applied for a role in the Ohio National Guard's counter-drug program, an investigative analyst position she learned during the interview process was operated through CPD. In 2017 she was offered and accepted the job.
Having been part of the military since 2012, Lovelace eventually started to consider a civilian life involving a corporate career path. Her professional experience as an investigative analyst-working with data to provide intelligence and analytical support-provided some direction as she weighed future options.
"What I wanted to get into was cyber," she explains. "Just having a Criminal Justice background, I felt, wasn't strong enough. I needed to expand my education." She began exploring Information Technology (IT) programs, and once again found what she was looking for at UC. "I really loved the MSIT program. You could do it all virtually, and they had great things to say."
The program took her around two years to finish and involved a lot of experiential learning, which Lovelace appreciated. "With the IT program, it's more of a lab environment. You do very hands-on stuff, which is really invaluable," she says. "You can't just read a book and figure it out yourself."
While studying in the MSIT program, volunteering with the UC Student Veterans of America group and going to her job within CPD, she picked up a part-time role with GE as a cybersecurity compliance investigator to add corporate experience to her resume.
"It was definitely a chaotic six months," she laughs. But even before she received her master's in December of 2022, she was hired on by Raytheon Technologies Corporation (now RTX), one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world, first in a principal cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analyst role and, as of summer 2024, as a manager of cyber threat intelligence.
"Our primary goal is trying to protect our company from what's called advanced persistent threat actors, specifically nation-state sponsored threat actors," she explains, listing North Korea, China and Russia as areas of particular concern. Lovelace's team is tasked with analyzing data breaches, both how they happen and associated activity, to determine threats. "We try to forecast, hey, here are the trends we're seeing, here's how to better protect the company."
Lovelace has certainly found her way in the world, and she credits UC for helping her gain necessary education and skills. And for anyone interested in pursuing a similar career path, she's quick to highlight learning as a key component of a successful career.
"I would say that education never stops," she says. "I'm currently trying to study for a few credentials. Cyber is constantly changing and you constantly have to be learning new things. It's just like technology-never stagnant, always changing and evolving."
Featured image at top: Chelsea Lovelace, manager of cyber threat intelligence at RTX, smiles while standing outside. Photo/CECH Marketing
