Thomas Russell is the National Cybersecurity Center's Career and Technical Student Organization Program Manager. Prior to coming to the NCC, Thomas, who is a retired military veteran, worked in the Signal Corps for the United States Army Communications Electronic Engineering Installation Agency (USACEEIA CONUS) at Raven Rock, Pennsylvania. He was stationed in various places overseas such as Korea and Germany, as an electronic communications supervisor. While in the Army, Thomas helped engineer the installation of communications equipment at various military sites across the United States and wrote the Army's first disaster recovery plan for telephone exchanges.
After retiring from the Army, Thomas worked as a Network Analyst for Time Warner Telecom, in Littleton, Colorado. His duties consisted of operating and maintaining a nationwide information system network by using a broad range of technology concepts, tools and applications. He was then promoted to Network Contingency Planning Manager, responsible for ensuring network viability by writing plans and coordinating disaster recovery exercises for Time Warner's National Operations Center (NOC). While at Time Warner, he earned degrees in Network Security and Information Systems Management.
Thomas resigned from Time Warner Telecom to pursue his dream of teaching. He received his master's in education for Applied Technology from the College of Saint Rose, in New York. As a teacher at Falcon High School, Thomas taught many classes such as Cybersecurity, Computer Applications, Networking, Technology Literacy, Health and Information Technology, Information Security and Computer Forensics. He started the CyberPatriot Program his first year there. Falcon High School has become one of the top high schools for cybersecurity and was recognized as one of the best schools in Colorado by the Air Forces Association (AFA) during the District 49 award ceremony. For the Cyber Maryland 2018 Competition, Falcon High School was one of the 8 high schools chosen to compete in the national finals held in Baltimore. For CyberPatriot competition, Falcon High School has qualified for the national semifinals each year.
While at Falcon High school, Thomas has won the Boettcher Foundation Teacher Recognition Award, The Falcon Educational Foundation's Outstanding Teacher Award, The District 49 Teacher of the Year Award, and has been nominated for Colorado Teacher of the Year Award.