
Dr. Jennifer Hesterman
Vice President, Education ServicesJenni provides oversight on company efforts to assess and enhance business resiliency in organizations, and oversees Watermark’s portfolio providing educational support to the government and private sector.
Dr. Hesterman retired as a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. Her last assignment was Vice Commander at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where she led installation security, force support, and the 1st Helicopter Squadron. She regularly escorted the U.S. president and other heads of state on the ramp.
After retiring in 2007, she started work as a private contractor in Washington, DC, studying international and domestic terrorist organizations, transnational threats, organized crime and the terrorist and criminal exploitation of the Internet. She is senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University and advises the Homeland Security Training Institute at the College of DuPage in Chicago.
Dr. Hesterman holds a doctoral degree from Benedictine University, Master of Science degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Air University, and a Bachelor of Science from Penn State University. In 2003, she was a National Defense Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. where she studied the terror-crime nexus. She is a 2006 alumnus of the Harvard Senior Executive Fellows program.
An award-winning writer, her book Soft Target Hardening: Protecting People from Attack was the ASIS Security Book of the Year for 2015 and the second edition of the book won the same award in 2019. She also authored Soft Target Crisis Management (2016) and The Terrorist-Criminal Nexus (2013). Dr. Hesterman is dynamic and sought-after public speaker for ASIS, FBI, DHS, ASIS, DoD, state and local law enforcement agencies, Major League Baseball and others.