Dr Céline Coma Brebel

Céline sends a clear message. Photo credit: Airbus CyberSecurity

Céline is not a doctor of medicine but of computer sciences. Enthusiastic, chatty and keen to explain her job, she’s not at all like Lisbeth Salander, the hacker in Swedish author Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. And she doesn’t wear hooded sweatshirts either! “On the contrary I wear a dress and necklaces every day and it’s very important to me, as well as to my female colleagues, that we look feminine” laughs this woman who is, today, a cybersecurity architect at Airbus CyberSecurity, a branch of Airbus Defense & Space.

““Defence is protecting my children and the nation””

Following a scientific baccalaureate in 1998, Céline opted to avoid the tough preparation for the competitive entrance exams to France’s top engineering schools. “Nobody was ever able to give me a satisfactory explanation as to what engineers actually do. They would just say: ‘an engineer earns a good living’ but I just couldn’t see myself in this unfamiliar world. But teaching? I understood what that was so that’s where I headed.” And then she giggles “but today I am actually an engineer!”

So, what does she do at her desk all day? “In fact, I’m not often sat at my desk! My job is an architect, which means that I have to find out what our clients’ needs really are and then offer them solutions.” She compares cybersecurity to a fortress. “You build the fortress slowly because the protective wall must be able to adapt in order to really protect the keep in the centre,” the keep being the data that must be defended.

Céline is currently also supervising a thesis and she likes looking after the 13/14 yr-olds who have to do a week’s work experience as part of the French school curriculum. “These work experiences create bridges and allow us to show them, in concrete terms, what cybersecurity entails. It’s funny because the boys are always the first to ask questions but as soon as I start talking about client relationships then the girls get interested.”

Following a BSc in computer sciences at the Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University, Céline did a Masters at the University of Rennes, then continued with a PhD at Télécom Bretagne (today known as IMT Atlantique). “In the framework of this PhD I did an internship in data security in 2006. At the time security was considered a constraint and somewhat superfluous,” she recounts. “Some people even warned me that I’d have no future!”

In 2009 she defended her thesis: “Interoperability and coherence amongst security policies for self-organising networks” with the intention of pursuing a university career. This would have involved a lot of travel, giving lectures and conferences around the world. “But then I unexpectedly became pregnant, completely naturally, when I’d been told I’d never have any children,” she explains “so I wanted to stay put so that I could really enjoy my daughter.” To her immense surprise she was hired during her pregnancy by the French DGA procurement agency (see glossary). “I’ll never forget the person who told me that as I was producing a child I was already working for the nation!”

The job introduced her to the operational side of things. “One learns really fast because there are not many people who work in data security and we were asked to use our skills on many different projects,” she explains in her youthful voice.

Céline spent eight years working for the Defence Ministry, notably the DGA, and to this day “remains very attached to the defence sector.” For her “defence is protecting my children and the nation” but she also likes being “in contact with high ranking officers who take their time and are very respectful, qualities also found amongst those who work in defence industries but which are apparently quite scarce elsewhere, according to my colleagues who work in other sectors.”

For once, Céline is behind her computer screens! Photo credit: Airbus CyberSecurity

Airbus CyberSecurity recruited her in June 2018. Her husband does a similar job in the same company “but we never work on the same subjects and avoid working together,” she says. Their children, because they now also have a son, are very proud of their mother. Her daughter’s school-friends (and their parents) ask her a lot of questions “notably about social networks,” a subject that interests a lot of women “whilst at a dinner party, for example, the men will pose more technical questions. Women often stop at the barrier of the computer itself,” she regrets.

Contrary to what one might imagine “computer experts have a huge variety of backgrounds. Although I was good at maths, you should never forget that within cyber there is an enormous diversity of jobs. The general public has this image of a hacker behind their screen but in fact our job is to protect data and in order to do so we have to understand how the client uses the data and make sure that the protective systems we put in place create the minimum of constraints for the end-user.”