Tarun Chaudhary, IFES Global Cyber Diplomacy Specialist

Tarun Chaudhary

Cybersecurity and Diplomacy Advisor
Center for Applied Research & Learning
Media Inquiries
media@ifes.org
General Inquiries
+1 (202) 350-6700

Dr. Tarun Chaudhary is the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) Cybersecurity and Diplomacy Advisor. In his role, Dr. Chaudhary provides expert cybersecurity technical and programmatic advice across IFES’s portfolio of activities and to their global constituency of partners. Dr. Chaudhary also concentrates on growing and maturing IFES’s thought leadership and research within the space of electoral cybersecurity as part of IFES’s Center of Applied Research and Learning.

Before arriving at IFES, Dr. Chaudhary worked at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) within the Department of Energy. He was responsible for federal cybersecurity oversight of two locations within the U.S. nuclear security enterprise. In this role, he performed full-spectrum auditing and assessment activities across the breadth of the contractor-implemented cybersecurity program spanning U.S. national security sites in Tennessee and Texas. In addition, Dr. Chaudhary was a federal authorizing official, a role requiring him to evaluate the risk of operating all electronic information systems across both sites for acceptance on behalf of the U.S. federal government. He also has 15 years of broad defense industry consulting experience, having provided expert consulting services to a wide variety of clients, including the Office of Net Assessment within the Pentagon, large defense prime contractors, and many other foreign and domestic clients while working for Joint Management Services, LLC in Georgia, USA, and early in his career at IHS Janes Strategic Advisory Services in Alexandria, VA, USA.

Dr. Chaudhary has a Ph.D. in International Affairs, Science, and Technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, USA, where he also received an MS and a BS. His research focuses on how cybersecurity professionals organize and collaborate to recognize and remediate large-scale problems central to the Internet’s continued function. Dr. Chaudhary has been the recipient of a number of scholarships, fellowships, and awards, including the National Science Foundation Cyber Corps Scholarship for Service, the NNSA Graduate Fellowship, and others. He has published work in the Oxford Journal of Cyber Security and co-authored numerous reports for the U.S. Department of Defense. He also maintains a Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC) as a Global Information Security Professional (GISP).