Catherine Ripley

Catherine Ripley is a retired U.S. Naval Officer with over 25 years of service to her country. As a diplomat she served at two different U.S. Embassies abroad for Defense Cooperation in The Hague, as well as for the Defense Intelligence Agency as the Defense Attaché in Madagascar. After retirement she held an executive leadership position with Raytheon, and now is a professor of political science at Pima Community College. Catherine was raised in Montana. She became one of the first women to be accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, where she earned a B.S. in Engineering and a minor in Political Science. She later received her Master’s in National Security Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School, and went on to serve as Executive Director for the Naval ROTC in Boston. In that role she trained over 1,600 midshipmen to receive degrees and commissions from Harvard, MIT, and other colleges and universities in the Boston area.