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Sajida Shabanali

Biography

Sajida Shabanali joined the UWF Center of Cybersecurity team in January 2023 and serves as the Employers Network Coordinator for the National Cybersecurity Workforce Development Program. A Pensacola local, she received her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of West Florida and is currently working on her second master’s in Cybersecurity at UWF. Sajida is a “people person,” and loves helping students achieve their career goals and supporting their professional advancement. With her Information Technology background, she understands first-hand how competitive the Cybersecurity job market is, and the benefit of enhancing one’s skill set with industry certifications acquired at the Center. Sajida’s goal is to connect each one of our amazing learners with their dream job. She firmly believes in dreaming big and that the sky is the limit. She believes that hard work, education, and making the right connections can create success from any circumstance, no matter how great the goal or big the dream. Her own life as a first-generation college graduate, immigrant, and one of the few women with a graduate degree in her extended family is an affirmation of this belief.

In her free time between work and classes, she is hopping on a plane to explore the world. She has visited multiple countries and five of the seven continents. She has an African Safari lined up on her 2023 bucket list. Her favorite destination is Dubai where she can ride a camel one day and have a snowball fight the next day. Life is an adventure and living each day to the fullest is her mantra.

Sajida was born In Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, a beautiful beach town in East Africa. Her great-grandparents migrated to East Africa from what is now India in the 1900s before the partition of India and Pakistan. Then, her parents moved to Dubai, UAE, in search of better job prospects, so she spent her school years in Dubai. Finally, they migrated to the US, where she has proudly become a citizen of the United States of America.

Publications

Bagui SS, Mink D, Bagui SC, Ghosh T, Plenkers R, McElroy T, Dulaney S, Shabanali S. Introducing UWF-
ZeekData22: A Comprehensive Network Traffic Dataset Based on the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. Data.
2023; 8(1):18. https://doi.org/10.3390/data8010018

Community Leadership

National Center for Women and Information Technology - NCWIT 2021 - Present

Awards and Honors

• USS Senate Award and Scholarship
• Alpha Beta Gamma and Phi Theta Kappa Honor Societies.
• The Social Science Award
• The Alumni Association Academic Award
• Outstanding Writing Award - Second Honors
• Nominated for the Bill Gates Millennium Scholarship
• Florida’s Great Northwest Wired Graduate Studies in Computer Science (WIRED GRANT
RECIPIENT), January 2010