PNNL

Jennifer “Jenny” Webster is a senior data scientist and group leader for the Cyber Analytics and Analysis group in the Emerging Threats and Technologies division. In this role, she leads a multidisciplinary team focused on enhancing the situational awareness of cybersecurity in national systems. She is passionate about mentoring and utilizing emerging technologies to rapidly deploy actionable insights, moving small-scale research into operational environments quickly. Webster holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Texas A&M University. Her research interests include human-created data analysis, community detection, geospatial analytics, data fusion for actionable insights, and machine-learning operations. 

Webster joined Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in 2013 and worked as a principal investigator on several projects throughout the lab in nuclear nonproliferation, community detection, and pattern-of-life analysis. The common thread in all of these efforts has been to understand how we can utilize data from a multitude of different systems to understand how humans interact with both the physical and digital worlds. As part of these efforts, she founded the GeoBOSS team, which simplified geospatial analytics and allowed for an easy transition between small-scale research and large-scale operational projects. She also hired and trained a critical mass of geospatial researchers and software engineers to deploy a first-of-its-kind software tool to the broader government community, allowing rapid deployment of research to sponsors. Most recently, she took a small sabbatical from PNNL to serve as a senior science manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where she led a team of scientists, engineers, and product managers to deliver actionable insights across the AWS sales organization. Under her leadership, her team expanded its impact from creating single proof-of-concept projects to delivering weekly results, which were leveraged across the entire organization.

• Pattern-of-life analysis
• Data science

• Applied mathematics
• Graph theory
• Nuclear nonproliferation
• Pattern recognition
• Python
• Spark

• PhD in mathematics, Texas A&M University

• BA in applied mathematics, University of California – San Diego

• Phi Beta Kappa

• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

• American Mathematical Society

PNNL

• Core Values Award for Collaboration (Team Lead category) (2022)
• Sponsor appreciation letters for innovation (2021)
• Scientist and Engineering Development Program – Class of 2017
• Outstanding Performance Awards (4)
• Letter of Appreciation from the Department of Homeland Security, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office Assistant Director for efforts on the Small Vessel Standoff Detection Project (2014)
• National Security Directorate “Of The Year” Project Award (2013, 2014)

Texas A&M University

• 4-year Research Assistantship with Dr. Wolfgang Bangerth under the Department of Homeland Security – Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, Academic Research Initiative Grant # 2008-DN-077-ARI018-05 – Fall 2008 to Spring 2012

University of California – San Diego

• Provost’s Honors Fall 2004 to Spring 2008
• Dean’s Award for Excellence, Department of Physical Sciences, November 2007