About Us

What is Docent Institute?

The Docent Institute (Docent) is a 501(c)(3) registered charitable non-profit educational institution based in Iowa. Its mission is “Cybersecurity and STEM education, inclusion, and outreach for the benefit of society.”

Programs and Services

Docent organizes cybersecurity/STEM camps for K-12 students, career days for high school students and competitions for college students. Docent hosts the premier Midwest annual cybersecurity conference, CornCon, held in the fall in Davenport, IA. Docent provides college scholarships, mentoring, apprenticeships/internships, career services and performs other public outreach related to cybersecurity education and career development, advancing technology, and the ethical use of technology.  Docent also works with IEEE to develop industry standards around the ethical application of technology. Current projects include developing a process for evaluating the trustworthiness of news sources, and a standard on the ethical use of AI.

DR. JOHN D. JOHNSON, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER, DOCENT INSTITUTE

Dr. John D. Johnson is Founder/President/CISO at Docent Institute. He is a Founding Member of Security Advisor Alliance, a member of SC Media Editorial Board, founding advisory board member for Cyber Education Foundation, founding advisory board member for Mass Cyber Corp, founding advisory board member for Ohio Cyber Women, and advisory board member for identity-blockchain startup, MedBlox.

John is CEO/Founder of Aligned Security, providing CISO advisory services and working with tech startups. He was previously a senior cybersecurity executive at Campbell Soup and was previously Cyber Risk Advisory Senior Manager at Deloitte. His focus areas include IoT, Industrial IoT/ICS security and Risk Management. John’s focus areas are cybersecurity and advancing technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, IoT, OT, blockchain, and quantum computing.

John has taught and developed numerous cybersecurity graduate courses for Excelsior College, St. Ambrose University and Eastern Iowa Community Colleges from 2003-2019. John is Chair of the IEEE Special Technology Community on Cybersecurity.

John was previously CTO of Revolutionary Integration Group (RIG), a startup focused on integrating disparate AI systems, leveraging blockchain and advanced analytics. John worked at John Deere for 18 years, serving as security architect where he managed security infrastructure and developed strategy and secure architecture solutions for protecting a global corporate network, endpoints, industrial systems and the supply chain.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Katharine Hawes CPO, Charlevoix Court [More]	Kate Kuehn CTrO, Aon [More]
Shawn Martin CEO/Founder, Mass Cyber Corp [More]	Kasi Paturi CEO, Global Cyber Security Initiative [More]