Khadija Taki Is Preparing to Build the Cyber Defenses of Tomorrow

Khadija Taki’s path to cybersecurity started a long way from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Taki grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. She speaks Arabic, French, Spanish, English, and conversational German. Her first career was in hospitality management, an industry that she said required her to read systems and people at the same time, simultaneously keeping operations stable and trust intact.

Though she didn’t know it at the time, that skill set turned out to be directly applicable to cybersecurity.

"The thread that runs through everything I have done is the same: protecting the things people depend on and translating between the technical and the human so that protection works," Taki said. "That thread is what led me to Heinz."

Today, Taki is a student in Heinz College's Master of Science in Information Security Policy and Management (MSISPM) program, with a concentration in AI Management. In the past year, she has presented original research at Heinz's Scholar-to-Scholar Showcase; had a collaborative paper accepted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Summer Symposium Series in Seoul, South Korea; interned with the Geospatial Intelligence ISAC working on critical infrastructure resilience; and served as principal investigator on a NASA L'SPACE mission concept team.

Why Heinz College?

When Taki was deciding where to pursue a graduate degree, she was looking for a program that didn’t force her to choose between the technical and policy aspects of security work.

"A lot of programs make you pick a side," she said. "Heinz lets you be the bridge, which is the entire point of my work."

The MSISPM program, which sits at the intersection of cybersecurity, policy, and management, was a fit for that reason. So was the AI Management concentration, which gave her space to dig into security governance at the same moment that AI was reshaping what that governance needed to look like.

As an international student with an unconventional background, Taki also looked for a program that recognized her unique skills and experiences. 

"I wanted a program that would take my full background seriously, including the parts that do not look like a traditional cybersecurity path," she said. "Heinz did."

How Students Put Cybersecurity Research Into Practice

One project that stood out during Taki’s time in the program was BlastMap, a research effort focused on identity and access management. She presented the work at Heinz's Scholar-to-Scholar Showcase.

"It was the first time I saw my own research land with an audience," Taki said.

She also worked on a collaborative research project on Human-Aware Multi-Agent Cyber Defense for Distributed Nuclear Operational Technology Systems. In August, she presented the research at the ICS Village at DEF CON 34 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

^{Above: Khadija Taki (center) and friens at DEF CON 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada.}  

Both experiences changed how she thought about her place in the field. 

"Those projects and that foundation taught me that I could not just study the field,” Taki said, “I could contribute to it."

Faculty mentorship has been part of that shift as well. Randall Trzeciak, who directs the MSISPM program and holds a dual appointment at Heinz and the CERT Program at CMU's Software Engineering Institute, has been a consistent presence. So has Tom Scanlon, a senior research scientist in the CERT Division who serves as adjunct faculty at Heinz and advises students on research.

"Working with Randy Trzeciak changed how I think about the field and about myself in it," Taki said. "His door has genuinely been open, and that kind of mentorship is rare, and it matters."

Outside the Classroom: Why Internships Matter

During her time in the program, Taki has explored real-world experiences well beyond coursework.

Through NASA's L'SPACE program, she serves as principal investigator on an interdisciplinary team building a tool for a real NASA mission challenge, carrying it from early concept development through technical evaluation. The program puts people from different disciplines in one room, focused on a problem with real stakes.

Her internship with the Geospatial Intelligence ISAC has covered different terrain. There, Taki works on critical infrastructure resilience under practitioners who operate at the national level. The ISAC places its scholars into communities of practice with concrete assignments.

For one project, Taki co-authored a white paper for the Italian think tank Trinità dei Monti on desalination vulnerability in the Gulf region, using Arabic-language sources to trace how regional conflict threatens the area's water supply.

"I modeled the desalination plant's control systems, scored each node by how much of the system depended on it to find what an adversary would hit first, then simulated the disruption that becomes possible during a regional conflict,” Taki said. “The paper did not just argue the infrastructure was vulnerable; it showed how to harden it before an adversary could strike."

For another ISAC project, Taki mapped telecommunications interdependency, tracing how a failure in one system cascades into the others that rely on it, and worked with Alias Cybersecurity on red teaming and penetration testing.

"This is the operator perspective that academic study alone cannot give:the difference between understanding a threat on paper and understanding what it takes to defend against it in practice," Taki said.

Mapping Taki’s Cybersecurity Journey

Taki moved to the United States without family or a support network in place. She describes that period as the source of a resilience she has carried into everything since.

"When you have already done the hardest things, starting over alone in a new country, the rest stops feeling impossible," she said. "You learn to bounce back because there is no other option, and that becomes a strength you carry into everything after."

For a long time, she also treated her non-traditional path as a liability. Coming to cybersecurity from hospitality management, without the standard background the field tends to reward, she spent time apologizing for what she lacked rather than using what she had.

That changed one day when she was sitting down to develop solutions for a NASA mission challenge, working toward a proposal with her team.

"I thought, ‘This is not a someday and it is not a simulation,’ " Taki said. "The girl from Morocco was in the room, doing the work."

Her hospitality background, she realized, made her better at reading risk and managing people under pressure. Her multilingual background gives her access to sources and threat data. Taki paired those advantages with deliberate technical grounding, earning more than 20 certifications from FEMA and CISA in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection.

After graduation, Taki plans to pursue a Ph.D., with a focus on cybersecurity, AI, and national security. 

"I want to see problems before they arrive and build solutions for threats that do not fully exist yet, so the systems people depend on are protected long before the first alert ever fires," she said. "Those are the problems worthy of a career."

Insights For Prospective Students

For anyone who looks at Heinz's cybersecurity programs and wonders whether they belong there, Taki has some advice.

"Belonging is not something you wait to be granted," she said. "It is something you build by doing the work and refusing to leave. You do not need permission to start, and you do not need a traditional background to be excellent."

She has particular guidance for women, international students, and people entering the field from other industries.

"If you are a woman, an international student, or someone arriving from another field, please understand that the perspective you bring is not a gap to overcome," she said. "It is the thing this field is short on. Show up as the full version of yourself. That is the candidate worth being."