Paul Judge
27 Ph.D. Chief Technology Officer - Cipher Trust Inc., Alpharetta, Ga.
When the 25th candle appears on their birthday cake, many young people experience a quarter-life crisis. The apprehensive question, “What am I doing with my life?” replaces the formerly lighthearted “Hmm, I wonder what I’m going to do when I grow up?”
By the time Paul Judge reached his 25th year, he’d completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Morehouse College (he did it in three years, he reminds TNJ), and had received a master’s and a doctorate from Georgia Institute of Technology in computer network security, and had been honored by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the Top 100 Innovators in the world. Now 27, he is a pioneer in the field of messaging security. That is, he’s a gatekeeper of sorts in America’s war on spam and computer worms.
As chief technology officer at Cipher Trust Inc., a Georgia company that provides enterprise e-mail security solutions, Judge is considered one of the industry’s leading authorities. Under his direction, Cipher Trust protects more than 2,000 networks and more than 30 percent of Fortune 100 companies, while showing no sign of stumbling off the cutting edge when it comes to encryption, e-mail and virus protection. Holding eight patents on technologies in computer security, Judge also relies on his previous experience with IBM and NASA to assure his company’s place as we try to protect ourselves from the curveballs that spammers and virus writers throw our way.
Moreover, as one of the founders of the Internet Research Task Force’s Anti-Spam Research Group and the author of numerous papers published in leading academic journals, Judge is a regular speaker at industry and academic conferences. He has also appeared in Forbes, The Washington Post, Business Week, The Boston Globe, The L.A. Times, and Black Enterprise and has been seen on CNN.
Judge may have answered, at a relatively young age, one of life’s more confounding questions, but there is more on his horizon. “If I had time, I would learn to fly,” he told TNJ.
