Technology News, Cybersecurity

NIST will fund cybersecurity training in eight states with $1.7 million

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September 18, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The National Institute of Standards and Technology will distribute over $1.7 million through nine cooperative agreements, with individual awards reaching $200,000, to bolster cybersecurity training in eight states. These funds will support Regional Alliances and Multistakeholder Partnerships to Stimulate Cybersecurity Education and Workforce Development (RAMPS) projects, directly linking educational programs to the needs of local businesses and nonprofits via the NICE Framework.

“The RAMPS program brings together industry, educational and economic development participants to collectively build a skilled cybersecurity workforce that meets the unique needs of each community,” said Karen Wetzel, director of the NICE program at NIST. The initiative aims to expand career pipelines and stimulate job growth in a field facing a critical skills shortage.

NIST Awards $1.7 Million for RAMPS Cybersecurity Initiatives

This funding demonstrates NIST’s strategy of directing resources to localized initiatives, and eight states are now benefiting from the latest round of cooperative agreements. Kentucky Community and Technical College secured $129,311 to address cybersecurity needs within the Big Sandy region of Eastern Kentucky, showing a commitment to extending training opportunities to underserved areas. The National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO) will also receive $200,000, specifically to bolster cybersecurity expertise within Virginia’s energy sector, focusing on critical infrastructure protection.

These projects will not focus solely on theoretical knowledge; practical learning opportunities, including internships and apprenticeships, are central to the RAMPS program’s design. The University of Houston, awarded nearly $200,000, intends to integrate hands-on experiences into its curriculum, preparing students for immediate contributions to the cybersecurity workforce. Wright State University in Southwest Ohio also received close to $200,000, further expanding the program’s reach and capacity for practical training.

With these new agreements, a total of 55 RAMPS communities are now established across 26 states, signifying a substantial expansion of NIST’s efforts to cultivate a robust and geographically diverse cybersecurity workforce. New Mexico Highlands University and the University of Michigan each received $200,000 to support similar initiatives in their respective regions, while the Strategic Ohio Council for Higher Education secured $199,995 for workforce development in Southwest Ohio. The emphasis on aligning education with local business and nonprofit needs, guided by the NICE Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity, underscores a targeted approach to addressing the nation’s critical skills gap.

RAMPS Projects Align Workforce Needs with NICE Framework

The newly awarded RAMPS projects will concentrate on practical skill development, with each of the nine cooperative agreements supporting initiatives that include internships, apprenticeships, and hands-on projects. This emphasis on applied learning distinguishes these efforts from purely theoretical cybersecurity education, addressing a critical gap identified by industry partners. NIST’s strategy centers on localized initiatives, and the geographic focus of the funding demonstrates that projects are designed to address the unique cybersecurity workforce needs of specific regions within eight states.

NIST’s partnership with SRI International to establish the Quantum Manufacturing Engineering Center, with an initial $20 million investment, complements these regional efforts by fostering innovation in quantum-resistant cryptography. The scale of this network underscores NIST’s commitment to a nationwide approach to cybersecurity workforce development.

NIST finalized three post-quantum encryption standards for securing data on August 13, 2024, and July 31, 2026, providing a foundation for the advanced skills these RAMPS projects aim to cultivate. The agency’s recent successful transmission of entangled photons over 62 kilometers on August 5, 2026, demonstrates its ongoing investment in the underlying technologies that will define future cybersecurity challenges and solutions.

The RAMPS program brings together industry, educational and economic development participants to collectively build a skilled cybersecurity workforce that meets the unique needs of each community.

Karen Wetzel, director of the NICE program at NIST

Florida Atlantic University will focus its $200,000 award on bolstering cybersecurity skills within Palm Beach and Broward Counties, alongside the Treasure Coast region of Martin, St. Lucie, and Indian River counties. The University of Tennessee will also receive funding to support cybersecurity training in its respective region.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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