Biography

I am a world class research scientist with over two decades of experience working in the defense industry, where I have led technical programs and research efforts in defensive and offensive cyber technology and operations. My research efforts have enabled me to working with research scientists from around the world while directly supporting defense organizations JTF-GNO, USCYBERCOM, DTRA, ONR, DARPA, NSA, OUSD, and the US Navy. I have a PhD in Computer Science and a passion for solving complex and cross-domain problems that challenge the status quo of cyber defense and information warfare.

During my tenure at the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) I worked as the principal investigator for over a dozen research and development projects focused on exploring the interplay between autonomy, cyber operations, and trust, culminating in a decades long research program on autonomous cyber defense sponsored jointly by OUSD, NSA, ONR, and ODNI. My research programs have spawned new research domains such as oppositional human factors, defensive cyber deception, and cyber psychology and span the cross-disciplinary fields of psychology, computer science, mathematics, and cyber operations with the goal of fundamentally changing how we defend computing systems, networks, military missions, and people. My teams have explored the creation of autonomous cyber systems through the use of autonomic computing, machine learning, decentralized control, game theory, expert systems, human-autonomy trust and trust calibration, defensive deception, cyber psychology, human-systems integration, human subjects research, and cyber operations domain knowledge.

During my career I have also contributed towards improving public science education through my work with non-profits such as League of Extraordinary Scientists and Engineers (LXS), which provided free hands-on science education for K-8 classrooms in San Diego County. My decade long participation as a board member and science educator has given me first hand awareness of and impact toward the improvement of science education for students in the San Diego metropolitan area.