Message from the Chair

Greetings, FIRST! The Annual General Meeting was held in June during the annual conference in Montreal. During the meeting, this year’s election results were announced. Michael Hausding, Mona Østvang, Yukako Uchida, and I were re-elected, and Carlos Alvarez was newly elected to the Board of Directors for the term 2023-2025. You can read more about Carlos’ background and goals for serving on the board here. Audrey Mnisi Mireku, Désirée Sacher-Boldewin, Olivier Caleff, Serge Droz, and Trey Darley also continue their 2022-2024 term. Together, we would like to thank our outgoing board member and previous Chair, Dr. Sherif Hashem, for the hard work, dedication, and leadership he provided. We are pleased to know he will continue to support and represent FIRST in our various international and regional initiatives.

Michael Hausding will continue as the Chief Financial Officer, and I am extremely honored and excited to serve as the Chair of the FIRST Board of Directors for the next year.

As evidenced in the 2022-2023 Annual Report, FIRST continues to steadily grow its membership, programs, services, and staff. If you are not actively involved in FIRST’s activities, I highly recommend reading the Annual Report and the quarterly newsletters to identify where you can engage. This will not only benefit you and your organization, but it will help FIRST achieve its vision, mission, and goals. Likewise, the Board of Directors will continue to evaluate FIRST’s programs and resources to develop a long-term strategy for growth and sustainment of this valuable community. We hope to share more information on some of this initiative soon.

I look forward to working with everyone in the coming year. Together, we can continuously improve FIRST and remain the premier organization for incident response and security teams!

Tracy A. Bills, Chair

Published on FIRST POST: Jul-Sep 2023