Dinah Davis received her MMath in Combinatorics and Optimization in 2003 under the supervision of Professor Edlyn Teske-Wilson. Her studies were focused in cryptography. She created a formal definition and properties for an electronic voting scheme and evaluated three different schemes against this definition and properties.
After completed her MMath studies, Dinah accepted a position at Research in Motion (RIM) as a security software developer. In the first year she found a weakness in a security algorithm that her team created and was able to modify it to prevent possible attacks before it was used in production. This became the first of many patents.
In her first five years at RIM, Dinah was a key member of the team that built and developed the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader. As part of this work she designed and wrote Java and C++ software for the SmartCard Reader, BlackBerry, and Windows Driver Components. Several patents resulted from this work. During that time she also built the first wifi security protocols for the first BlackBerry wifi device, implemented electromagnetic countermeasures for AES on the BlackBerry, and maintained the BlackBerry Cryptographic API. Maintaining the crypto API enabled her to implement and support security protocols, standards, and algorithms such as TLS/SSL, JSR177, Public Key Infrastructure, ISO 7816-1, FIPS 140-2, RSA, SHA-1, AES, ECC, WLAN, Root and MIDP certificates and 3DES.
In January 2010, Dinah was promoted to team lead of the BlackBerry Platform Security team. She led a team of eight people in four different locations in Ontario and the US. She was responsible for the design, planning, resourcing and completion of high priority software features that covered the areas of Cryptographic API, Application Control, Data Encryption, and Security Protocols and Public Key Infrastructure. During that time she was the technical lead for the larger security team for multiple versions of BlackBerry OS, and was responsible for all features completing on time to standards.
In November of 2011, Dinah chose to leave RIM to become a development manager at Trustwave, a global security company. There she lead of team of Java developers that developed the core security information and event management (SIEM) framework. SIEM technology provides real-time analysis of security alerts generated by network hardware and applications.
In October of 2012, Dinah joined then Desire2Learn (D2L) as a development manager. D2L is the developer of the Brightspace integrated learning platform which is used by higher education institutions (University of Waterloo included), K-12 school districts, and corporate government customers. In this role she leveraged her experience in mobile communications from RIM to lead the team that built the communication and collaboration tools within Brightspace. In November of 2013 she was given the additional responsibility of running a second agile development team with both teams working the learning outcomes problem space for K-12 and higher education institutions. Over the last year she has been leading and growing these two teams. As a result she has recently been promoted to senior development manager.
Aside from her professional life, Dinah has taken an active role empowering girls to choose a career in STEM and women in technology to become leaders. She manages the social media presence for the Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph, and Cambridge chapter of the Canadian Association of Girls in Science (CAGIS). She is a champion for the Women In Tech communitech peer2peer group, and is a mentor for the communitech Women in Tech Mentorship program. She also attends many conferences and events that promote women and girls in STEM as a speaker, in a booth, or as a workshop leader.