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Jessica Yoo Perry

Program Manager, Grid Modernization Program Operations and Stakeholder Engagement (POSE) , Grid Deployment Office (GDO), U.S. Department of Energy

U.S. Coast Guard

Class of 2024

She may not be physically standing watch at sea for the United States, but Jessica Yoo Perry is at the ready to protect the nation’s energy security from threats both foreign and domestic. Shortly after receiving her MSCRS degree, Perry was promoted into her current job at the U.S. Department of Energy, as Program Manager of the Program Operations and Stakeholder Engagement (POSE) team within the Grid Modernization Division of the Grid Deployment Office. An 11-year veteran of the Coast Guard and Navy, she holds three graduate degrees and has more than 10 years of post-military experience across cybersecurity RD&D, technology intellectual property, cybersecurity risk policy, software development, operations, and engineering, in both private and public sectors.

In her new role, Perry supervises a team of professionals overseeing $13 billion in grid modernization grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The Grid Modernization Division oversees activities that prevent outages and enhance the resilience of the electric grid. Its modernization programs aim to increase grid resilience at the transmission and distribution levels and enable grid integration of distributed energy resources and new grid-related technologies.

Perry’s subject matter expertise, cybersecurity research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) for energy delivery systems has put her front and center in private-public working groups, federal steering committees, and communities of practice. For example, in her prior role as Headquarters Technical Program Manager (with DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy, Security, and Emergency Response) overseeing the DOE’s $50 million cybersecurity RD&D portfolio, she recently served as a panelist at an industry conference on cybersecurity in the EV charging ecosystem.

Perry sought out the NYU Law/Tandon MSCRS program as a way to broaden her focus on cybersecurity program management, she said. “I was interested in getting to better understand the issues that drive the budgets of technical R&D and investment efforts from the top down—such as policies, regulations, and private sector business concerns. The curriculum was very germane in that respect and also exposed me to how to consider policies in other sectors and how those use cases and lessons learned could apply in our strategy and RD&D programs.  For example, in my prior Technical Program Management role, we were watching CIRCIA very closely on how we can develop the right capabilities in the Operational Technology/Industrial Control Systems threat mitigation portfolio to be responsive to evolving cyber reporting regulations—and there were plenty of class discussions on this. The third semester focused on national security issues and critical infrastructure. Both are primary drivers in day-to-day risk management for the energy sector.”

Because Perry’s previous graduate degrees required considerable travel and time away from work, she especially appreciated the MSCRS program’s hybrid format. “This was the best part of the program, and it worked well with the cohort culture. My classmates have been an incredible sounding board of peers.”

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