Executive Education

Dr. Shawn Butler is a former Associate Professor of the Practice and Manager of CyLab's Risk Management Working Group at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Butler has over 30 years of experience in all aspects of systems development including program management, system architecture, security, requirements development, and testing. She conducts research in economics-driven software and security engineering.

Dr. Butler's research is focused on the application of decision sciences in security engineering in order to develop cost/benefit techniques for security managers and software engineers. She developed a framework and methodology that assists security managers in making security investment decisions. Current research interests are development of a threat data base, extension of the framework to support detailed analysis of costs and benefits of risk mitigation factors, and development of an automated model that enable security architects to evaluate software architectures with respect to risk.

Prior to coming to Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Butler served for twenty years as an officer in the U.S. Army, retiring in 1996 as a lieutenant colonel. Positions Dr. Butler held in the Army included: Chief Systems Engineer, Defense Information Systems Agency, in which capacity she was responsible for all aspects of software design, integration, security, contract management, and fielding of the Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment (DII COE), the largest command and control system and software infrastructure in the Department of Defense; and Director of Software Development, Alaskan Command, where she was the principle software engineer and program manager for all software development in support of the Alaskan Command's command and control system.

Dr. Butler earned a BS in linguistics from Penn State University, an MBA from Case Western Reserve University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon.