Margaret Zientek is a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in the Information Technology and Systems Division which focuses on cybersecurity and cyberspace challenges of national and global significance. Margaret's particular work focuses on applied data science and text analytics, and gaining insights from raw data. She also provides policy recommendations based on this work. Previously, Margaret worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory performing physics-based modeling of surveillance systems. Margaret has a Ph.D. in particle physics from Cornell University where she worked at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN searching for dark matter and developing firmware for real-time charged particle track reconstruction.