Karen Guttieri

Karen Guttieri is Senior Fellow for Cyber Policy and Strategy at Janos LLC and Associate Director of Probability Management, a nonprofit that develops open-source tools and standards for representing uncertainty. A recurring question throughout her research career has been how institutions adapt to emergent forms of power—and what happens when established strategic frameworks no longer serve effective decision-making.

Her current work focuses on the sociotechnical foundations of cyber power and resilience, decision-making under technological uncertainty, and the implications of artificial intelligence for strategic stability. Her research on cyber resilience argues for moving beyond recovery toward sustaining military operations through ongoing disruption. With Sam L. Savage, she examines how uncertainty is represented in cybersecurity decisions, showing how commonly used averages can obscure what decision-makers often need to know: the chance of crossing a consequential threshold. A third line of research examines how adversarial agentic AI may affect strategic stability by accelerating action, manipulating observable behavior, and undermining the credible commitments states rely on to settle conflicts short of war.

Her career spans more than two decades in defense research, teaching, and academic leadership. From 2022 to 2025, Guttieri led the Jack Voltaic cyber–critical-infrastructure resilience program at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point and taught in the Department of Social Sciences. She previously served as Dean of the Air Force Cyber College. Earlier, at the Naval Postgraduate School, she designed and directed graduate programs in stability operations and led multidisciplinary and multinational research on sociocultural behavior, military occupation, and institutional change.

Guttieri holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia and was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. She was inducted into the Order of Thor in 2025 and is an Honorary Member of the U.S. Army Civil Affairs Regiment.