Meet the Team!


Building an fake company, including applications, infrastructure, content, people, and information is a massive effort. It takes tens of thousands of hours to make this event come together. Our team of volunteers from around the globe work together throughout the year to make this event a reality. From recent competitors and graduates to long time industry experts, some who have just started and others that have been doing this since inception (and wonder why they still do it), each of our volunteers is committed to building the next generation of Cybersecurity professionals.

Core Team

  • Justin M Pelletier

    Global Director

    In addition to leading CPTC, Justin is the Director of the Cyber Range and Training Center in RIT's Global Cybersecurity Institute. He is also a combat veteran and currently serves as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.

  • Lucas Morris

    Competition Director & Founder

    Lucas helps to organize the volunteer team, develop competition systems, coordinate with the various teams, and has a deep experience with cat herding. By day, he’s also a Senior Manager at Security Risk Advisors and moonlights as an Adjunct Professor at RIT’s Global Cybersecurity Institute.

  • Tom Kopchak

    Competition Director & Founder

    Tom handles the communications and operations on a day to day basis and does a bit of everything wherever he is needed. By night, he is the Director of Technical Operations at Hurricane Labs and is an expert on everything Splunk. You'll also find him at Baldwin Wallace University as an Adjunct Professor.

  • Meredith Kasper

    Competition Director

    You'll find Meredith Kasper lurking around many areas of the competition helping out with everything from registration to competition integrity. When she isn't busy helping organize CPTC, she can be found at Hurricane Labs as their SOC Technical Account Manager, Consultant, and Office Cat.

  • Jason Ross

    Director, Applications & Founder

    Jason is the wizard that ensures all of the various applications come together and work, mostly, coherently. Or at least as much as they would in the real world. He works in AppSec at a mysterious company.

  • Marshall Hallenbeck

    Director, Applications

    Creating a new company annually, including the applications, is no easy task. Working as a team with Infrastructure, our Applications leads develop new systems and apps each year. He is also a Senior Penetration Tester at a security consulting firm and OffSec tool developer.

  • Austin Kanarr

    Director, Infrastructure

    Austin develops the networking, servers, and systems within the competition environment. Working with the applications team, they build the targets students will attack during the penetration test. Leveraging his background in both Red Teaming and Blue Teaming he creates as many fires as possible from real world experiences.

  • Forrest Fuqua

    Wizard, Infrastructure

    From hacking thirty year old ATMs to writing entire PLCs in PHP, Forrest is the guy who is usually putting together the crazy, insane, industry specific systems within the competition environment each year. By day, he works for RIT as the main engineer and architect of the CyberRange at the GCI.

  • Tim Ip

    Director, Monitoring

    Always watching.

  • Dan Borges

    Director, Special Projects

    Dan has been with the competition since its second year and has worn many hats in terms of getting this production ready over the years. From inventing the OSINT part of the competition and expanding this to the World teams, Dan has also restructured our scoring rubrics and redesigned many aspects of interaction and support throughout the competition. Now he has returned to technical development leading the special projects challenge development team. He is also the author of Adversarial Tradecraft in Cybersecurity.

  • Rachel Ekstrand

    Director, World

    While the entire team is working to support students in InfoSec, Rachel is bringing a focus on preparing competitors to move into the workforce, especially in finding OSINT to use against a target. So, if you are finding client data on the Internet, it was the OSINT team; however, they also develop all of the content, documents, and data that makes the client environment real. She is also a Red Team Operator working in the Finance industry.

  • Stuart Morris

    Director, Scoring

    Formerly, our wizard behind our Open Source Intelligence, he has taken over as the Scoring Czar, ensuring continuity for the team and continued iteration of the scoring criteria. He is also the Director of Security at Ladder Insurance.

  • Rocio Slobodzian

    Director, Engagement

    You can find Rocio around CPTC with her Camera attached to her hand or using her passion for Chaos Management! Behind the scenes she works to make the competitor experience is enjoyable and pushes for inclusive and welcoming competition!

Key Volunteers

  • Raul Martinez

    Infrastructure

  • John Alves

    Infrastructure

  • Fred Rybin

    Infrastructure

  • Gideon Gray

    Applications

  • Chris Midkiff

    Applications

  • Izzie Walton

    Applications

  • Joshua Neubecker

    Monitoring

  • Ian Cook

    World & Monitoring

  • Jasmine Weddle

    Special Teams, Monitoring, World

  • Greg Moore

    World

  • Jennifer McCollum

    World

  • Jeff Hayslett

    World

  • Cathy Ullman

    Scoring & World

  • Matthew McDougal

    Special Projects

  • Joe Needleman

    Special Projects

  • Brock Wagehoft

    Webmaster

Special Thanks

  • Bill Stackpole

    Founder

  • Daryl Johnson

    Founder

  • Alex Levinson

    Founder

  • Chris Butler

    Infrastructure

  • Colum McGaley

    Applications

  • Alexander Shulman

    OSINT

  • George Shulman

    Director, Treats and Snacks

 Want to volunteer?

Everyone featured on this page has put in years of effort, but there are many more not featured that support the competition.

We all are here to make this competition fun, interesting, and educational. We’re always looking for people who share a similar passion of not only furthering the education of students entering the cybersecurity field, but those who want to build something from the ground up. Each year, the scenario used in the competition is original- designed with the help of our volunteer staff and industry professionals. All knowledge is welcome, as it helps us build a more realistic and interesting game for our competitors.

Sound like fun? We need help with it all- scenario design, to software development, and even people to help out day of. Doesn’t matter if you’re a first year student or a full time professional. We need your help!