Instructors

Chris Herr

Adjunct Instructor
cherr2@andrew.cmu.edu

Chris Herr is a senior engineer and team lead for the Cyber Workforce Development directorate in the CERT Division, a part of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Chris has over 16 years of experience at the SEI developing and facilitating cybersecurity and forensics training courses and content including demonstration videos and interactive hands-on exercises and assessments. Chris currently supports the Department of Homeland Security creating skills-based training labs and supports the U.S. Army and Air Force in creating new role-based training courses. Chris has also served as an adjunct faculty member for the Heinz College since 2015, teaching the Network Defenses course and serving as a capstone project advisor. Prior to his time at the SEI, Chris served four years as a non-commissioned officer in the Finance Corps as a vendor pay analyst and contract certifying officer at Fort Bragg, NC and abroad in Mosul, Iraq. Chris has a B.S. in Economics and a M.S. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a graduate certificate in Teaching and Learning from Norwich University.

Matt Kaar

Adjunct Instructor & CyFIR Track Coordinator
mkaar@andrew.cmu.edu

Matt Kaar is a senior engineer and team lead at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI), with 20+ years building cyber exercise environments and cloud infrastructure. He serves as cloud technical lead for the Integrated Multinational Cyber Information Sharing and Training Environment (IMCITE), a Department of War platform preparing U.S. foreign mission partners for offensive and defensive cyber operations. Earlier, Matt architected government competition and exercise programs: at CISA, he helped develop the President's Cup Cybersecurity Competition, an annual event recognizing the federal government's top cybersecurity practitioners; at U.S. Cyber Command, he built the large-scale virtual environments behind the first-of-their-kind CYBER FLAG and CYBER GUARD joint exercises, delivering realistic training to thousands of U.S. and partner-nation personnel. He has presented this work at Black Hat USA, AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific, and the NICE Conference & Expo. He has also held information security roles at The MITRE Corporation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and Internet Security Systems. Matt holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and an M.S. in Information Security Technology and Management from the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon. He lives in Reston, Virginia, with his wife and two daughters who are growing up way too fast.