Zara Ahmad-Post

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT ZARA AHMAD-POST

Zara is a renowned data scientist and researcher in the field of cybersecurity, with a particular focus on cloud security and threat intelligence. Over the last ten years, she\'s worked across industry, academia, and government to build secure systems and advanced threat detections, advancing deep learning-based NLP, network science, and privacy research. She received acclaim for her work on AI & ML at MITRE in the D.C. area, where she operationalized research for CISA, DoD, and DHS. Zara is currently on the security team at DigitalOcean, where she conducts research and builds solutions at the intersection of cloud computing, cybersecurity, and AI/ML. An active and passionate community leader, Zara engages in academia through the University of Arizona in Tucson, her hometown. She teaches a masters’ level class on cloud computing, with a special focus on AI and MLOps. She is the founder and Chief Research Officer of Z Collective, an independent research and development lab that focuses on mentorship and connecting bright, early-career engineers and researchers with industry leaders who are tackling some of security’s most pressing challenges. She collaborates on research with the Department of Defense, members of the Open Source Software Foundation, several Universities, and countless industry partners.