Mark Winstead is a senior systems engineer with over thirty-five years of STEM experience, starting as a cryptologic mathematician for the Department of Defense and including stints as a software engineer, systems architect, and systems engineer with the MITRE Corporation since 2014, specializing in systems engineering for security. Between the DoD and MITRE, he has worked for defense contractors, an Environmental Protection Agency contractor, a social network startup, a fabless semiconductor manufacturer of commercial security protocol acceleration solutions, and a network-performance management solutions company.
Dr. Winstead’s current role is as the Systems Security Engineering Department Chief Engineer, working with various MITRE sponsors on standardization of systems engineering for contested operational domains efforts. Past work within MITRE involved support for the United States Air Force, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For NIST, he co-authored NIST SP 800-160 Volume 1 Revision 1 Engineering Trustworthy Secure Systems with NIST’s Ron Ross and MITRE’s Michael McEvilley.
Dr. Winstead is a Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) by the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Within INCOSE, he is the co-chair of the Systems Security Engineering Working Group. He is active with the Resilient Systems Working Group and the Future of Systems Engineering (FuSE) Vision and Roadmap Stream group. In 2023, INCOSE honored Dr. Winstead with an Outstanding Service Award for his work on integrating security into systems engineering practice.
Dr. Winstead earned his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Virginia after earning a master’s and bachelor’s in Mathematics from Florida State University (undergraduate minor in secondary education). He currently resides in Colorado Springs, CO.