Cybersecurity Team Is Ready for Action

Faculty advisor John Chiodo, director of innovation, engineering and computer science, echoes Meyer’s sentiment as the Masters team prepares for CyberPatriot, a national competition that presents high school and middle school students with a series of online competition rounds. Teams are given a set of virtual operating systems and are tasked with finding and fixing cybersecurity vulnerabilities while maintaining critical services.

“I am optimistic about the team’s chances of making it to the national semifinals,” Chiodo said, giving his students credit for their coding know-how. “Through the years, we have been accumulating more knowledge, which helps. But it is the students who leverage this during the competition season.”

Joining Meyer on this year’s roster are Ihor Makhynia ’24, Alice Fuller ’25, Mohan Zhang ’26, and new members Carlo Asam ’24, Hengnian Roger Pan ’25, Gretta Hong ’25, Luolan Laura Yuan ’25, and eighth grader Oliver Mandel.

Meyer recalled getting his start in middle school when he was involved with the Robotics Team. “Initially, I had not known anything about cybersecurity, but I had a good amount of experience with coding languages, including Python and Java,” he explained. “After joining the team and seeing what the competitions involved, I became heavily interested in cybersecurity which is, in my opinion, one of the most important applications of computer science in an online world.”

Fuller loves being on the team because of the community that it fosters. “It's awesome being in a room and working with people that have the same interests as you,” Fuller said. “The competition is essentially a puzzle that we have to work together to solve. So when we do solve it and are collaborating and bouncing ideas off each other, it's a really fun atmosphere that's hard to find anywhere else on campus.”

The team will have a practice round on Saturday, October 7, and will begin Round 1 of the main competition on Monday, October 23.