SMSGT BONNIE RUSHING
The CogWar Trailblazer
Critical Cognitive Infrastructure
SMSgt, United States Air Force. First enlisted member ever assigned to a doctoral program
PhD Candidate, Cybersecurity, Laboratory for Cybersecurity Dynamics, University of Colorado Colorado Springs (via the Air Force Institute of Technology)
Senior Faculty Member, Department of Military and Strategic Studies, US Air Force Academy
Special Operations airborne linguist and signals intelligence team lead. 700+ flight hours aboard four C-130 variants
Defense Meritorious Service Medal.
Named to the "40 Under 40" list in STEM
Building The Cognitive Warfare Framework
When Bonnie Rushing began researching cognitive attacks, she found more than 100 competing definitions of what a "cognitive attack" actually is, and almost no agreement on how to measure one. So she built her own. Drawing on her doctoral research in cybersecurity and years teaching wargaming and strategy at the US Air Force Academy, Rushing introduces a working framework for defining, measuring, and defending against cognitive warfare, including her Cognitive Influence Calculator, a tool that estimates a population's susceptibility to cognitive attacks using press freedom and media trust data. She'll also share findings from a live wargame exercise in which the majority of participants admitted disinformation shaped their real decisions, sometimes dangerously so. For a field still arguing about definitions, Rushing offers something rarer: a way to actually measure the problem.
Based in Stanford's Mathematical Medicine Group and Petritsch Laboratory within the Department of Neurosurgery, Bagley's research spans human-AI interaction, brain-computer interface security, and the mathematical foundations of AI safety as it relates to human cognition. He is one of a small number of researchers worldwide attempting to build the theoretical infrastructure the field of cognitive security currently lacks, and has presented his work at the Cognitive Security Institute's seminar series.