Dr. Valerie Nelson is an Applied Research Mathematician at  the U.S. Department of Defense where she is the first black female who graduated from its Applied Mathematics Program in 2004.  She is one of eight graduates of the Department of Defense’s Senior Technical Development Program’s Class of 2020 where she focused on applications of Data Science to education and training, introduced a framework for instructional escape rooms to assess student competency and teaching effectiveness, and established guidelines for machine learning implementation.  She is currently a Deputy Technical Director for cryptographic solutions with applications to cyber security and recently served as Department Head for the Mathematics, Cryptanalysis and Data Science curricula at the National Cryptologic School (NCS). She was also a lead for NSA’s Data Science Literacy Initiative and the IC’s Augmenting Intelligence using Machines (AIM) effort.  She has served as adjunct faculty at George Washington University, Howard University, Morgan State University, and Prince George’s Community College, and she recently completed a one-year assignment at University of Maryland Baltimore County with its Instructional Technology Team, working with faculty and staff on the use of data analytics to inform instruction and strategy. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mathematics at Morgan State University, her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Howard University as an alliance for Graduate Education in the Professoriate  (AGEP) and Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) fellow, and her Graduate Certificate in Data Science at the University of Maryland College Park.