The International Foundation for Protection Officers (IFPO) announced the appointment of Dr. Jennifer Hesterman to its Board of Directors.
Dr. Jennifer Hesterman is a retired Air Force colonel who served in three Pentagon tours and commanded in the field multiple times. Her last assignment was Vice Commander at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where she led installation security, force support, and the 1st Helicopter Squadron, and regularly escorted the President and other heads of State on the ramp. She is the recipient of the Legion of Merit and the Meritorious Service medal with 5 oak leaf clusters.
After her military retirement in 2007, Dr. Hesterman started working 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 presently Vice President, Business Resiliency and Education Services for Watermark Risk Management International, and a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.
She 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; her resulting book, Transnational Crime and the Criminal-Terrorist Nexus, won the Air Force Research Award for 2004. She is a 2006 alumnus of the Harvard Senior Executive Fellows program.
An academic author for Taylor and Francis, CRC Press, her book Soft Target Hardening: Protecting People from Attack was the ASIS Security Book of the Year for 2015. She also authored Soft Target Crisis Management (2016) and The Terrorist-Criminal Nexus (2013). Dr. Hesterman teaches graduate level security courses for the Federal government and is a sought after public speaker for the FBI, DHS, ASIS, DoD and state and local law enforcement agencies. She is on the ASIS School Safety and Security and Women in Security councils. She also coaches and mentors women on how to achieve work/life balance and remove barriers to success in the workplace.
“We are pleased to welcome Dr. Hesterman to the IFPO’s Board of Directors,” said Rick Daniels, IFPO Board Chairman. “Our goal is to provide relevant educational programs and opportunities for security personnel. With Dr. Hesterman’s background and experience we are even better equipped to achieve these goals."
Sandi Davies, Executive Director of the IFPO, added, “We welcome Dr. Hesterman to a dedicated and talented Board. We look forward to her contributions in fostering IFPO’s mission statement and the Foundations objectives.”
