Successful UW Alumna Featured in Lunch and Learn Series

A University of Wyoming graduate will be the guest speaker at UW’s Cybersecurity Education and Research (CEDAR) Center’s “Lunch and Learn” event Nov. 6.

Caitlin Long, the chairman and president of Symbiont, and a 1990 UW graduate, will present “Bitcoin and the Birth of Blockchain: Enabling Solutions for a Better Future” in the UW College of Agriculture Building auditorium. The event begins at noon and is free and open to the public.

Long’s presentation will detail how blockchain technology and "smart contracts" can affect people’s lives for the better by using technology to establish trust, thereby removing the need to trust institutions and decentralizing power. Her contention is that blockchain improves interactions with one another, with institutions and with governments. It also solves a problem that afflicts many sectors of the economy, including financial services, health care, government and supply chains: wasted resources due to information duplication. New technology helps automate and streamline workflows in many parts of the economy.

Long’s company, Symbiont, is the leading smart contracts platform for institutional uses of blockchain technology and winner of WatersTechnology's Award for Best Distributed Ledger Project in 2016 (Buy-Side Technology Awards). She previously spent 22 years on Wall Street as a managing director in senior roles, working for Morgan Stanley (2007-2016), Credit Suisse (1997-2007) and Salomon Brothers (1994-97). Long has been active in bitcoin since 2012 and blockchains since 2014, and she served on Morgan Stanley's internal blockchain working group in 2014-16.

Long received her bachelor’s degree in political economy from UW (1990) and is a graduate of Harvard Law School (1994) and the Kennedy School of Government (1994). A Laramie native, she served two terms on the UW Foundation Board and also served on the College of Arts and Sciences Board of Visitors.

The presentation also will be available live and on demand through UW’s WyoCast streaming service at http://WyoCast.uwyo.edu.