‘I’m a protector and a defender’

Over the past 25 years, UM-Dearborn alum Anne Marie Zettlemoyer has built a career helping organizations navigate risk at the intersection of business, cybersecurity and national security. Beyond her time as a special advisor for the United States Secret Service, she has led teams at companies like MasterCard, Activision Blizzard and Capital One and served on numerous boards of directors. She currently serves as chief information security officer at QPoint, a data and AI security company, and is a fellow at the National Security Institute. She also serves as a Faculty Expert for the Institute for Applied Network Security

She’s got a strong foundation for her career — her UM-Dearborn degree. “UM-Dearborn is a special place that I’m always going to want to breathe life into,” she says. “I love Dearborn. I love Michigan. I believe in Dearborn. I believe in Michigan. God help a man that says otherwise.” She graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting and finance in 2003.

Zettlemoyer, who goes by AMZ, now lives in Washington, D.C., but she grew up in Sterling Heights, a community known for its diversity. Raised first-generation with Filipino roots in a multicultural household, she says she learned early how to navigate different perspectives and environments. “It meant becoming comfortable speaking up and contributing ideas, even when you might be the only person in the room with your particular background or experience,” she says. “Fields like cybersecurity, national security and technology are still heavily male dominated, but I never viewed that as something that should limit participation. My upbringing helped build the confidence to focus on the quality of the work and the ideas being presented.”

As an elementary school student, she stood in front of her school board to champion equity for her classmates. “I lived in such a multicultural neighborhood and school district and it was obvious to me that some folks were being treated different ways than others,” she recalled. “I didn’t like that. It was troublesome to me.” The experience made her realize that institutions can change when people are willing to speak constructively and advocate for better outcomes.

Her drive to learn and help continued through high school. Zettlemoyer was hired to work at a call center, where she quickly became curious about the work behind the scenes. “That curiosity pushed me to look beyond the work itself and understand how the operation functioned. I started paying attention to how incentives shaped behavior, how performance was measured and why some calls were more successful than others,” she recalls. 

By the time she graduated high school, she had helped redesign the compensation model for agents and helped develop the quality control process for call team members. “Those early experiences taught me something that has stayed with me throughout my career: When you take the time to understand how systems work, you often find opportunities to make them better,” she says.

Revamping a call center was not Zettlemoyer’s only surprising teenage endeavor. She also began training in mixed martial arts during this time. She says this experience taught her to consider tactics like leverage, timing, distance, control and redirection. “Training across those styles forced me to constantly evaluate what was in front of me and decide which approach made the most sense in that moment,” she says, adding that most MMA challenges require a diverse toolset, another lesson she has carried into her career.

“In cybersecurity and risk management, effective solutions are rarely built with a single technology or control,” she explains. “The strongest defenses come from combining different perspectives, disciplines and tools into an architecture that works together.” Being multifaceted and balancing the right and left brain has been a superpower for her over the years, she notes.  “One of the strong points that I get called for is the ability to maneuver, to handle change and ambiguity, and lead teams and companies through it.”

Over time, martial arts training became teaching. Zettlemoyer and a friend started a school for cross-training (an early iteration of MMA), and they knew the best way to get the word out about their school was to fight in competitions. So she entered the ring.  It didn’t take long for her to make a decision about her fighting career. “I didn't like it, I'll tell you that,” she says. “I'm a protector and a defender, I'm not an aggressor.” While she trained in martial arts for a few years more, she ultimately traded punching bags for a Pilates reformer. Today, her early morning sessions give her a workout for brain and body. She often solves complex math problems in her head during movements.

When preparing for college, Zettlemoyer says UM-Dearborn was her first choice. “Kids that come to UM-Dearborn go for a purpose. You're there to get an education so that you can build a career,” she says, adding that there’s a real return on investment for students. “I think UM-Dearborn is very attuned and very attractive to entrepreneurial-type spirits.”

Zettlemoyer says her accounting professors set her up for success. “The class size, the amount of care and attention that you can get from your professors is really something special,” she observes. With faculty support, she also founded the University of Michigan–Dearborn chapter of Beta Alpha Psi, the international honor society for accounting and finance students. Establishing the chapter had been a goal of the campus for more than two decades. While launching a chapter typically requires at least two years of preparation and institutional coordination, Zettlemoyer built the chapter in roughly eight months during her senior year. Under her leadership it became an award-winning chapter and it remains active and thriving at UM-Dearborn more than 20 years later. “Organizations like Beta Alpha Psi play an incredibly important role because they create community and exposure. Students gain access to mentors, industry leaders and peers who are navigating similar career paths,” she says. “When you see people who share your background succeeding in a field, it makes that path feel more real and attainable.”

Zettlemoyer earned her MBA from U-M’s Ross School of Business in 2007. She planned to stay in the Detroit area until she was recruited by the Secret Service. The organization was especially interested in her business acumen and how it supported a deep understanding of security issues. Although accounting and finance might seem very different from security, Zettlemoyer explains that there are big overlaps in the fields. For example, accounting systems have to incorporate strong security systems that can protect against disruption, fraud and abuse. “All of these are security principles,” she explains. “You have to learn how to build models, be good at data and learn how to quantify things.”

The job with the Secret Service took her to the nation’s capital. After working in D.C., she felt an undeniable pull to the security field. “I loved it,” she says. At tthe time,  there were no degree programs related to cybersecurity, so self-motivation was key. “You had to figure it out — teach yourself and have others teach you,” she says. And so she did, learning, climbing the ranks, and eventually starting her own businesses.

Being able to speak both business and security languages has helped her communicate effectively with company leaders. One thing she is adamant about conveying is how diverse viewpoints strengthen teams. “When people come from different experiences, they tend to see risks, opportunities and solutions differently, which is incredibly valuable in fields like cybersecurity where anticipating threats and solving complex problems requires multiple angles,” she says.

Her expertise is also in high demand outside boardrooms and C-suites. She’s been a frequent keynote speaker, is a published author and has appeared on national news several times.

She may be more than 500 miles away from home, but her commitment to creating strong networks of people frequently includes UM-Dearborn. Since graduation, Zettlemoyer has routinely engaged with current students and alums, and she is currently a member of UM-Dearborn’s National Advisory Council. 

“Mentoring has become one of the most meaningful parts of my career,” she says, adding that she regularly connects with students and early career professionals who are trying to break into finance, cybersecurity and national security. “Talent exists everywhere, but opportunity does not always reach everyone equally,” Zettlemoyer says. “If I can help open doors, share lessons from my own career, or mentor students who are navigating similar challenges, then I am helping contribute to the next generation of leaders.”

Story by Sarah Derouin