EdgeCon Autumn 2026

As with any organization with technology assets, colleges and universities are required to maintain business operations, and they face significant pressure to safeguard their institutions' data, research products, and critical infrastructure while also serving as research hubs and innovation development centers. Academic freedom remains a pillar in higher education institutions and thus may require a more liberal use of technology to foster a creative atmosphere. Higher education institutions are critical to communities and societies by providing centers to learn, research, and innovate. As part of these activities, they host vast amounts of critical and sensitive information, innovative intellectual property, student and financial records, and are prime targets for attacks via technology and cyber (Oladele & Samuel, 2025; Wolfschwenger et al., 2022). Corporations and businesses may find it easier to adopt a standardized computing environment, such as restricting certain access or capabilities on computing devices and their networks. Higher education institutions wish to be seen as promoting research and innovation and thus will pursue a computing approach that minimizes technology challenges for staff. Balancing ample information security and cybersecurity with the inherent need to foster innovation requires a strategic framework that respects academic culture without compromising security best practices.

This paper will explore the topic, provide background and data, and propose how institutions of higher education can balance security with openness for research and innovation. An intentional, content-focused approach to a Zero Trust Architecture strategy and philosophy, along with a flexible structure and governance that support research and innovation, will be provided. This proposed document will provide a novel blueprint for other higher education institutions to use for ideation and implementation to balance a resilient cyber posture and will also empower academicians and their departments, rather than stifling them. The intended framework should be considered a base that can be amended to meet institutional needs, not a final artifact, but one that can be updated as new technologies and paradigms arise.

Presenters:

• Stan Mierzwa, Director & Lecturer, Kean University
• Greg Bellotti, Sr. VP of IT and CIO/CISO, Kean University
• Keiron DeFreitas, Director of Enterprise Technologies, Kean University

How can institutions move from data collection to data action? At Thomas Edison State University, the answer comes through an integrated approach combining dashboards, real-time analytics, and actionable business processes. This session shares how TESU develops purpose-built dashboards to track progress toward institutional goals and the business processes that catalyze meaningful operational change.

Designed to serve both executive leadership and functional teams, our dashboards provide a shared view of progress on key outcomes such as registration-to-census and term-to-term retention. The insights from these dashboards became the foundation for cross-departmental collaboration and process improvement. By connecting data insights to tactical adjustments, the university created a feedback loop which enables student engagement, process refinement, and accelerates strategic impact.

Attendees will leave with practical guidance on designing and implementing similar systems at their own institutions, including strategies for stakeholder engagement, performance tracking, and fostering a culture of data-informed decision-making.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to translate institutional strategy into measurable, real-time metrics.
• Explore how data dashboards can drive collaboration and accountability.
• Identify approaches for sustaining continuous process improvement through analytics.

Presenters:

• Matthew Brown, Director, Data Reporting and Strategy, Thomas Edison State University
• Casey Kennette, Associate Director of Operational Reporting & Analytics, Thomas Edison State University

Text is data. Institutional text holds as much measurable signal as any spreadsheet of numbers. Student comments, policy documents, syllabi, strategic goals: all encode information we can mine with analytical rigor. What holds us back is a label: we call this text "qualitative" and shelve it as Too Hard, when "qualitative" names a methodological choice, not the data itself. In this session I will demonstrate how we use transformer-based embedding models to convert institutional text into a mathematical space. There, we can quantify drift and alignment across practices and populations, and turn narrative and open-ended text into evidence for assessment and planning. Come as a strategist, not a statistician: no mathematics background required. I keep the focus on what the method reveals, not the linear algebra under the hood.

The presentation centers on three applied use cases: thirteen years of accreditor language tracked as its meaning quietly drifts, alignment scores computed between learning outcomes and assignments, and shifts detected across longitudinal student feedback. Each yields quantitative measures that are auditable and reproducible.

Our learning outcome for this session is to identify the underused text higher ed systems already hold and to weigh what it takes to make it measurable.

Presenter:

• Viktoria Popova, Executive Director of Institutional Effectiveness, Analytics, Planning, Centenary University

For security leaders, the challenge is no longer just managing vulnerabilities, but managing the narratives around them. AI is changing how vulnerabilities are discovered, weaponized, and prioritized, yet many organizations struggle to translate these changes into meaningful risk reduction. This session focuses on governance, decision-making, and accountability in vulnerability management programs.

Presenters:

• Jeremy Livingston, CISO & Deputy CIO, Stevens Institute of Technology
• Rafat Azad, Associate Director, Information Security Services, Stevens Institute of Technology

AI development has had a significant effect on all of society, especially in the past few years. One area it will have a significant impact is cybersecurity. AI has potential for good use such as in triage, response, and detection. On the other hand, attackers can also use AI for phishing, deepfakes, and other attacks not yet created. However, are the students of today prepared for these new threats of today and tomorrow? Our presentation will discuss the approach we are currently taking to prepare our students for this constantly evolving new threat dynamic. We will show examples of how we added and incorporated AI principles and tools to both current and proposed courses. Additionally, we will discuss how our research agenda will add additional opportunities for our students to prepare for future threats and opportunities. Attendees will leave with a practical blueprint for modernizing and preparing their students for the current and future needs of the cybersecurity field.

Presenters:

• John Agar, Academic Specialist - Computer Science, Union College of Union County, NJ
• Quba Raza, Academic Specialist - Cybersecurity, Union College of Union County, NJ

For years, grant and subaward reporting at Harrisburg University relied on siloed spreadsheets, a legacy Jenzabar system, and manual data imports handled by whoever happened to be available that week. It worked, in a sense, but errors were easy to miss, accountability was hard to pin down, and we had no real way to catch misspending or subaward risk until it had already become a problem.

So we built our own platform in-house, server-based, with centralized access controls and one source of truth for all our research and grant data. In this session I'll walk through how we identified the compliance gaps in the old process, what controls we actually built into the new system (access permissions, audit trails, clear lines of accountability), and how it changed our visibility into subawards and final reporting.

I'll also talk about where we're headed next. We're already using generative AI for about 20% of our pre-award proposal drafting, and I'm working on governance documentation for how AI gets used in grant writing, trying to balance the efficiency it offers against compliance, originality, and what funders expect. I don't have this fully figured out yet, and I'll be upfront about what's still unresolved.

If you're dealing with siloed systems, weighing whether to build your own platform instead of buying one, or trying to work out AI governance for grants, this session should be useful.

Presenter:

• Julia Dunst, Director of Research, Grants, Compliance, Harrisburg University of Science and Tech

So, you have been charged with implementing a new cloud based enterprise application (or even and onsite instance) for your institution. These days cloud based, SaaS systems are commonplace. While there are many variables with new systems and how they are implemented, they are normally time consuming and require partnerships with other divisions across your campus. Cloud based systems have challenges that on premises systems do not. Experience and lessons learned over the last 20 years will be shared during this presentation, which will cover forming an implementation team, reviewing business practices, data migration, going live on your new system and system hand-off to the application owner. After a period of time for Q&A, there will be an opportunity for the audience to share challenges they have experienced in the past implementing a new enterprise system.

Presenter:

• Ron Loneker, Jr., Director, IT Special Projects, Saint Elizabeth University

Colleges and universities invest heavily in preventing cyber incidents, but even robust security programs cannot eliminate all disruptions. When identity services, cloud platforms, student systems, or critical vendors fail, technical recovery is only part of the problem. Institutional leaders must also decide what must continue, what can operate in a degraded state, what should stop, and who has the authority to make those decisions.

This session reframes cyber resilience around the institution’s essential services rather than individual technologies. Using practical higher education scenarios, participants will learn to identify minimum viable operations, expose hidden dependencies across systems, vendors, and people, and assign clear decision rights before an incident occurs.

Presenter:

• Dr. Dawn Dunkerley, Virtual Chief Information Security Officer, Edge

Mercer County Community College successfully migrated to a SaaS environment several years earlier but recognized the need to provide institutional leaders with faster access to trusted data, analytics, and reporting. The college sought an integrated platform that could deliver actionable insights into key institutional priorities, including admissions, enrollment, student success, degree progress, and completion.

Following a comprehensive readiness assessment, Mercer partnered with Voyatek to implement the Student Success Analytics Cloud platform, creating a unified foundation for strategic decision-making and operational reporting across the institution.

During the implementation of the Admissions Analytics module, Mercer encountered a significant surge in fraudulent and ""ghost"" student applications. Rather than treating this as a separate initiative, the college extended its existing implementation by adding Voyatek's Application Fraud Detection and Identity Verification module. This enabled Mercer to identify and prevent fraudulent applications before they entered the enrollment pipeline, ensuring a more accurate incoming class while avoiding inflated enrollment metrics. The solution also significantly reduced the time and costs associated with manual fraud detection, verification, and data cleanup, allowing staff to focus on supporting legitimate students and advancing institutional goals.

Presenter:

• Dr. Dawn Dunkerley, Virtual Chief Information Security Officer, Edge

Today, the network is the critical core that just about everything else at the institution relies on. Keeping this vital resource available and health requires more than a simple Ping to ensure things are “working”. A network issue is now so much more than an inconvenience: an outage is a loss of business applications, VoIP phones, and cameras and access controls, which can have real consequences and even impact life safety.

Such an essential resource requires in-depth monitoring of not only network devices, but also everything those systems need to function, including leveraging PRTG Network Monitor and SNMP to look deeper into Cisco & HPE Aruba switches, Palo Alto Firewalls, APC UPSs and more.

This session will cover not only monitoring the network, but also what’s needed to ensure reliable uptime and high performance. This will include:

• In-depth monitoring of network device critical components
• Utility, backup power and UPS alerting and statistics
• Environmental trending and alerting
• Internet Bandwidth Usage
• Uplink performance and capacity planning
• Troubleshooting with historical data
• Server availability and performance
• Essential client device monitoring
• Network visibility
• Identifying anomalies in comparison to normal operations

Presenter:

• Michael McGuire, Network Operations Manager, Monmouth University

How do you accelerate AI transformation across an entire institution while managing risk, ensuring accountability, and keeping equity at the center? This session shares Moravian University's Presidential AI Task Force journey, a thirteen-month initiative that built the infrastructure, policies, and culture needed to responsibly integrate AI into teaching, learning, and operations.

The real challenge in AI adoption is organizational change. Discover the systems we built to move our institution from resistance to reliance: creating an inclusive governance structure that gave every stakeholder voice and ownership; reframing AI as an empowerment tool that reduces workload rather than replaces expertise; establishing transparent ethical frameworks that built trust instead of fear; and developing cross-functional committees that broke down silos and created champions across departments.

Learn how we transformed skepticism into innovation by partnering rather than mandating and built the leadership infrastructure, including our Executive Director of Emerging Technologies role, to sustain momentum beyond the task force timeline. We'll share specific tactics: how we identified and empowered early adopters, created feedback loops that gave resisters agency in shaping implementation, and designed pilot programs in high-enrollment courses where students historically struggled to demonstrate tangible impact.

This session addresses EdgeCon's core themes of responsible acceleration: modernizing student support applications through AI-powered learning tools, developing data infrastructure for ethical decision-making, and creating the organizational systems needed to manage risk while driving innovation.

Key Takeaways:

• Organizational change frameworks that transform resistance into adoption
• Governance structures that distribute ownership and build trust
• Faculty engagement systems that create champions, not obstacles
• Leadership infrastructure for sustained AI transformation beyond pilot phase

Presenter:

• Jill C. Anderson, Vice President, Development & Alumni Engagement, Moravian University

How do you accelerate AI transformation across an entire institution while managing risk, "For years, grant and subaward reporting at Harrisburg University relied on siloed spreadsheets, a legacy Jenzabar system, and manual data imports handled by whoever happened to be available that week. It worked, in a sense, but errors were easy to miss, accountability was hard to pin down, and we had no real way to catch misspending or subaward risk until it had already become a problem.

So we built our own platform in-house, server-based, with centralized access controls and one source of truth for all our research and grant data. In this session I'll walk through how we identified the compliance gaps in the old process, what controls we actually built into the new system (access permissions, audit trails, clear lines of accountability), and how it changed our visibility into subawards and final reporting.

I'll also talk about where we're headed next. We're already using generative AI for about 20% of our pre-award proposal drafting, and I'm working on governance documentation for how AI gets used in grant writing, trying to balance the efficiency it offers against compliance, originality, and what funders expect. I don't have this fully figured out yet, and I'll be upfront about what's still unresolved.

If you're dealing with siloed systems, weighing whether to build your own platform instead of buying one, or trying to work out AI governance for grants, this session should be useful.

Presenters:

• Julia K. Dunst, Ph.D., Director of Research, Grants & Sponsored Projects, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology
• Dr. Lauren Durkin, Director of Accreditation, Harrisburg University

For over 20 years, Edge has operated EdgeNet, the purpose-built optical fiber network engineered for higher education's needs, supporting 100% of member demand around the clock without oversubscription or the tradeoffs common to commercial ISPs. In this session, Edge's Principal Network Engineer draws on two decades of hands-on experience designing, deploying, and operating a statewide DWDM optical transport infrastructure, sharing the technical and operational lessons learned along the way, and how those lessons have provided innovation-supporting services and outcomes to our community.

Attendees will get a practitioner's view into how Edge partners with member institutions to take on the burden of complex network operations, including managed optical fiber services that pair existing or new fiber assets with Edge-provided hardware and expertise to support campus-to-campus and campus-to-data-center connectivity. Referencing member examples of institutions with high-demand network needs, this session will explore how a shared statewide optical backbone enables scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency, freeing internal IT teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure upkeep. Attendees will walk away with practical insights on optical network design, operational best practices, and the value of a managed partnership model for institutions looking to modernize their own network capabilities.

Presenters:

• Jim Stankiewicz, Associate Vice President & Principal Network Architect, Edge
• Bruce Tyrrell, Associate Vice President Program & Services, Edge