Faculty:

Matt Bishop (University of California at Davis)

Melissa Dark (Purde University)

Ida Ngambeki (Purde University)

Phillip L. Nico (California Polytechnic State University)

Jun Dai (California State University, Sacramento)

Professionals:

Stephen Belcher (NSA)

Students:

Minghua Zhu (University of California at Davis)

Somdutta Bose (University of California at Davis)

 

Matt Bishop received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University, where he specialized in computer security, in 1984. He was a research scientist at the Research Institute of Advanced Computer Science and was on the faculty at Dartmouth College before joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis.

His main research area is the analysis of vulnerabilities in computer systems, including modeling them, building tools to detect vulnerabilities, and ameliorating or eliminating them. This includes detecting and handling all types of malicious logic. He is active in the areas of network security, the study of denial of service attacks and defenses, policy modeling, software assurance testing, and formal modeling of access control. He is interested in electronic voting, was one of the members of the RABA study for Maryland, and was one of the two principle investigators of the California Top-to-Bottom Review, which performed a technical review of all electronic voting systems certified in the State of California.

He is active in information assurance education. His textbook, “Computer Security: Art and Science”, was published in December 2002 by Addison-Wesley Professional. He teaches introductory programming, software engineering, operating systems, and (of course) computer security.

 

Dr. Melissa Dark is currently the W.C. Furnas Professor of Technology in Computer and Information.  From 2003-2011 she served as the Assistant and then Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Planning in the College of Technology. Melissa provided key leadership in launching and managing the college¹s strategic plan, which focused on improving student recruitment and retention, defining signature areas for the college that drove growth in curricula and research, enhancing diversity, improving fund raising, and faculty recruitment in key academic signature areas and accountability through measurable metrics to our goals. She was the first research dean in the history of the College and successfully led the College in increasing it sponsored research funding from $300,000.00 to over $11,000,000.00.  Melissa Dark has extensive experience teaching, curriculum development, and instructional research and assessment. She has led several national projects in educational transformation.  She has been active in defining the cybersecurity body of knowledge, leading faculty development programs nationwide, and helping define educational research priorities in cybersecurity education. 

She is currently leading several projects/initiatives in cybersecurity education including:
INSuRE - this project is a cybersecurity research collaborative that uses the cybersecurity student talent pool to work on problems of national interest supplied by federal agencies and national labs, and at the same time develops hands-on, applied research skills of students.
Secure Programming Clinic - this project that is developing a concept inventory to diagnose learners¹ misconceptions in secure programming.
·Cyber fMRI - this project that is investigating the use of representational fluency to develop deep conceptual understanding of selected complex cybersecurity topics.
·C5 ­ this project is focused on developing the capacity of community colleges in cybersecurity and computing.

 

Dr. Phillip Nico (http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~pnico) is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at California Polytechnic State University, better known as Cal Poly (www.calpoly.edu), in San Luis Obispo, CA. His current research interests include computer science education, especially computer security and secure software development, as well as whatever shiny projects happen to wander by. 

 

Jun Dai is an assistant professor in California State University, Sacramento. His research and teaching interests mainly lie in securing the enterprise level network and distributed systems. His background and expertise well support these interests, spanning the areas of operating system (mainly Linux kernel), hardware-enforced virtualization (mainly QEMU-KVM), network-wide information flow monitoring and tracking, attack graph-based vulnerability analysis, intrusion and malware detection, and cyber situation awareness, etc.

As a reflection that his research perspectives and focuses extend to the cloud, mobile, user behavior, big data, social network, situation awareness, vehicle, and multimedia environment, the systems that he develops evolve all the time. With emerging capabilities gained from novel insights, they fit themselves well into the new environment.

 

Minghua Zhu is a PhD student in computer science at the University of California at Davis.  Her area of research is computer security. She worked in silicon valley for ten plus years before before joining UC Davis.

Somdutta Bose is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Davis.  Her area of research is computer security. She has also received a Masters degree from UC Davis on June, 2017. She has research experience in network data anonymization and intrusion detection tools. She is also a part of the secure programming clinic. Her responsibilities include providing additional support to students practicing secure and robust programming techniques in C/C++. Prior to joining UC Davis, she received a bachelors degree in Information Technology and worked for around 7 years in software development.