Paula Farina, an information systems security engineer who leads the electronic warfare cybersecurity team within the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport’s undersea warfare electromagnetic systems department, won a Technology Rising Star award at the 2021 Women of Color STEM Conference.

Rising stars are women with 21 or fewer years in the workforce who are helping to shape technology for the future. Farina began her career at Division Newport in 2016, having served 11 years as a senior test engineer at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific.

This past year, her team made tremendous strides in furthering the Naval Sea Systems Command’s strategic framework mission priority of cybersecurity to prevent, detect, characterize and mitigate cyberattacks on shipboard and shore networks.

“Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Farina achieved great success in the area of cybersecurity, which has been recognized by Submarine Electromagnetic Systems Program Office,” Division Newport said. “She led the Electronic Warfare Cybersecurity Team in developing and implementing a new virtual risk management framework process for submarine assessment and authorizations. With the new virtual solution in place, Farina and her team achieved 10 virtual submarine electronic warfare support system (AN/BLQ-10) cybersecurity assessments and authorizations concurrently in under one year.”

In addition, Farina volunteered as the co-coordinator of Division Newport’s annual Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) from 2019-20 and is leading this year’s campaign.

“Her enthusiasm, initiative and drive in spreading the word about CFC to the workforce helped the CFC campaign exceed the command's 2020 goal for fundraising by 116%, raising a total of $144,837,” the award states.

Farina has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Connecticut College and a master’s degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

NUWC Division Newport is a shore command of the U.S. Navy within the Naval Sea Systems Command, which engineers, builds and supports America’s fleet of ships and combat systems. NUWC Newport provides research, development, test and evaluation, engineering and fleet support for submarines, autonomous underwater systems, undersea offensive and defensive weapons systems, and countermeasures associated with undersea warfare.