#5/10 ICEC Morning Coffee-Afternoon Tea (MCAT)

'The Challenge of Teaching CS Policy to Students' This month we are delighted to welcome Devin Lynch who is Senior Director of the Paladin Global Institute. He joined Paladin from the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), Executive Office of the President, where he was a Director for Cyber Policy and Strategy Implementation. In this role, he wrote the National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan (Versions 1 and 2) and led the interagency coordination group dedicated to implementing the National Cybersecurity Strategy.

Devin brings extensive public policy experience from prior roles as a Professional Staff Member in the U.S. House of Representatives, a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate, and senior policy positions at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In parallel, he has served in the U.S. Navy Reserve for over 20 years, including combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is coming along to highlight that policy students need genuine technical literacy — not coding skills, but enough understanding of systems, dependencies, and failure modes to govern and critique technical infrastructure responsibly. Drawing on two GWU courses (Cybersecurity Policy and AI Security, Power, and Geopolitics), I will outline a pedagogy built around durable frameworks first, live questions before definitions, and cases that make abstract systems tangible. The goal is students who can explain, reason causally, and defend recommendations — not perform engineering identity.