Student Profile
Ana Pinczuk
Board Member , SmartRent
Class of 2025
“Not too nerdy and not too lawyerly—just right for business.” That’s how Ana Pinczuk would sum up the NYU Law/Tandon MS in Cybersecurity Risk and Strategy program. She should know—since graduating from Cornell with two engineering degrees, her career has spanned an era that began with the first commercially successful PCs through to AI-assisted robotics. Along the way, Pinczuk led R&D teams for AT&T, developing and launching its IP Platform, spent 14 years at Cisco, including as Services COO, and sat on the boards of several tech companies—while also picking up graduate degrees from Wharton and Carnegie-Mellon. “My personal mantra is to maximize my learning through new experiences, broad exposure, and education,” she says.
After serving as COO of an AI robotics startup, Pinczuk recently pivoted to being exclusively on boards. “I’ve served on public company boards for nearly 10 years and have really enjoyed the wide range of issues we address,” she explained. “These can include defining the company’s strategy, mergers and acquisitions, profit levers, risk management, talent development, and more. I also participate on several nonprofit boards, such as AI4All, where we focus on making an impact by ensuring that all humanity is AI-ready and that AI represents humanity. This is a very dynamic time, marked by disruptive technologies like AI and shifts in our global markets and regulation. This is a great time to learn, be involved, and make an impact.”
Such broad exposure has convinced Pinczuk that no organization can afford to ignore cybersecurity. “Cybersecurity manifests itself differently depending on the particular business. For example, I am on the board of a cyber company, so cybersecurity is our business. On my auto-tech company board, we focus on product security to ensure that advanced safety and user experience solutions are secure. Cyber resilience ends up being a topic in almost every business.”
Keeping current with the rapidly evolving world of cyber is critical, Pinczuk says, and while she sought out the NYU MSCRS as a “personal learning journey and a challenge, it’s a very useful degree that also reinforces the fact that I understand the cybersecurity space and can play a leadership role in cyber in my work.”
Although her background is mainly technical, Pinczuk’s goal in pursuing the MSCRS degree was to complement that experience from a legal and policy perspective. “The legal and regulatory elements have been very informative and help with my board work. On the technology side, I was able to explore areas of interest like the use of AI in cyber, and even got to do some hacking exercises. Being on boards, I’m on the road a lot, and I’ve found the mix of pre-residency and onsite residency to be very workable for my schedule. On top of that, I’ve really enjoyed the faculty. They are all well connected and bring in amazing speakers, and they’ve engaged a set of advisors that support the program as well. The class cohort is also very fun, and I am particularly pleased with our capstone team. We have different experiences and expertise, and have truly enjoyed exploring our capstone project together. If I had to write a headline for the program, it would be something like “Cyber-Savvy and Policy-Aware: Mastering Cybersecurity and Regulation at NYU!”