Researcher Profiles
USA CFITS has assembled a talented team of researchers whose interests are profiled below
Professor
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
tandel@southalabama.edu
Dr. Todd Andel is the Dean of the School of Computing at the University of South Alabama and a Professor of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Florida State University in 2007. Dr. Andel served as an Assistant Professor from 2007 to 2011 and Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering division in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology (2011). Dr. Andel has graduated 8 Master’s students and served on 14 thesis committees and one doctoral committee. He served 23 years on active duty in the U.S. Air Force and is a retired Major specializing in test and evaluation, education, and cyber defense research. He has published over 25 papers and journals related to engineering protocols, network security, formal methods, cyber defense, and systems design. Dr. Andel is currently the co-PI on a five year $2.1 M grant from the National Science Foundation for educating Cyber Scholars and the co-PI on a two year $476K National Science Foundation infrastructure grant that will advance USA’s cybersecurity research capability. Dr. Andel has shared in $250K of prior grant funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to investigate security protocols, software protection, and embedded systems protection. Dr. Andel has research interests in mobile network security protocols, protocol security analysis, secure electronic voting, and embedded systems protection.
Publications
https://www.southalabama.edu/colleges/soc/computerscience/resources/andel_cv.pdf
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
hlbarnett@southalabama.edu
Mr. Barnett holds a Bachelors degree from the University of South Alabama, where he currently serves as Director of CFITS and also sits on the Career Tech Advisory Board of Baker High School, the Alabama Educational Television Commission, chairs the USA School of Computing Industry Advisory Board and is President of NFIB Alabama. Mr. Barnett has advised K-20 education for over 30 years as an industry expert, encompassing K-12, vocational and university level institutions. He has external funding from the Alabama Innovation Fund, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, local government and industry. Mr. Barnett has a five year Education Collaboration Agreement through his Center (CFITS) with the Aviation Missile Research Development Engineering Center at Redstone Arsenal. He served for the past two decades on the Advisory Board for the School of Computing. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Alabama Forest Owners Association. In 1988, Les and two others founded Omniphone, a telecommunications equipment design and manufacturing company, where he served as President and CEO for 20 years, retiring in 2008. His publications include The Phone Fraud Niche; Compensation: How Much and By What Means?; The Prison Marketplace; and From Soup to Nuts: Prison Phone Management Systems, all published in various trade magazines. In 2008 he had been appointed as Elector for Presidential College of Electors from First Congressional District, Alabama. In 2007 Les was appointed to the Alabama Educational Television Commission for APTV by Governor Bob Riley and Re-appointed in 2014 by Governor Robert Bentley, where he currently serves as the commissioner from the First Congressional District. In March 2005, he helped to develop a two day course for Public Safety Professionals entitled Public Safety Communications. The course is used for Continuing Education credit through the University of South Alabama. His research interest are digital forensics, Cyber assurance, Health Informatics, Additive Manufacturing and K-12 STEM education.
Publications
https://www.southalabama.edu/colleges/soc/computerscience/resources/les-barnett-bio-sketch.pdf
Associate Professor
Dr. Ryan Benton is the Chair of the Department and an Associate Professor of Computer Science within the School of Computing (SoC) at the University of South Alabama. He is a member of the Data Science Ensemble and the Digital Forensics Information Intelligence Research Group. Prior to joining USA, Dr. Benton was a research scientist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette), where he served within the Informatics Research Institute (IRI) and the Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS); he was also a founding member of the center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI), the only National Science Foundation Industry University Collaborative research Center in Louisiana. Dr. Benton, while associated with UL Lafayette, also served as Director of Research for Star Software Systems Corporation from 2001 to 2005. He received his B.S. degree in Computer Information Systems (1995) from Loyola University New Orleans and his M.S. (1997) and Ph.D. (2001) in Computer Science at UL Lafayette. His research interest lies in the fields of data mining and machine learning, with an emphasis upon advanced pattern mining methods, novel graph mining algorithms, and applied applications. A current focus area of the applied applications is digital forensics, as demonstrated by his involved in the Center for Advanced Forensics Research Science.
Publications
Assistant Professor
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
mblack@southalabama.edu
Dr. Michael Black is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing. He received his PhD in Information Assurance & Security with significant experience in network security and digital forensics. He has served as a network security/design engineer consultant with several manufacturers including Uncles Ben’s Rice, M & M Mars, Pedigree, Oreck and DuPont. He has also conducted numerous investigations for civil clients and regularly testifies as a digital forensics expert in legal proceedings for both state and federal court. He has also conducted workshops on Digital Forensics at SigITE. He has served as a program committee member for IEEE/SADFE-2008 (Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensic Engineering). He holds several industry certifications related to digital forensics and network security. He aided in the design of the Network Focus Track within the ITE department, and recently developed the Digital Forensic Track, which started in 2009. In 2010, he started the development of the IA courses for the IS Master’s Program, which started in 2012. His research involves Information Assurance, advanced data carving methods, virtualization security, and SCADA security.
Publications
https://www.southalabama.edu/colleges/soc/computerscience/resources/michael-black-publications.pdf
Associate Professor
Information Systems and Technology
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
dbourrie@southalabama.edu
He is a member of Digital Forensics Research Group, Data Science Ensemble (currently listed as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence), and Health Informatics groups.
Dr. Bourrie is an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Technology in the School of Computing. His Ph.D. in Business Information Systems is from Auburn University in 2014. His areas of research focus on Big Data analytics, secondary data analysis, security, database, and the diffusion and dissemination of innovations. Dr. Bourrie is also a Hortonworks University Academic Partner. His work has been published in a variety of journals and conferences.
Publications
https://www.southalabama.edu/colleges/soc/computerscience/resources/david-bourrie-publications.pdf
Associate Professor,
Health Informatics Curriculum Coordinator
Information Systems and Technology
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
mattcampbell@southalabama.edu
Dr. Matt Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Information Systems and Technology Department at the University of South Alabama and serves as the coordinator for the Health Informatics program. Dr. Campbell completed his Ph.D. in Business Information Systems from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received his MBA and BS degrees from Tennessee Tech University. Dr. Campbell started at USA in 2010. His research centers on the end-user impact on security, serious gaming, and health informatics. He was recently awarded a patent along with two other USA researchers for their work in using technology to reduce medication errors in hospitals. Dr. Campbell has published in numerous journals and has received funding from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Intelligence Community.
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kTg6gNgAAAAJ
Professor
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
huang@southalabama.edu
Dr. Huang is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing at the University of South Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from the University of South Carolina. Prior to the appointment at USA, he was a Research Specialist in Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, & Epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina, and an Assistant Professor at Benedict College, respectively. His research areas machine intelligence, semantic technologies, biomedical Informatics/bioinformatics, and semantic data mining, with more than 30 refereed publications. He is an Editorial Board member of several journals, has served on the Program Committee for many premier international conferences, and has also served as a reviewer for many prestigious journals, such as IEEE Internet Computing, BMC Genomics, PLoS One, World Wide Web Journal, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
Publications
Professor
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
tjohnsten@southalabama.edu
Dr. Tom Johnsten is a Professor in the School of Computing at the University of South Alabama. His research interests include data mining, bioinformatics, data warehousing, and text mining. He has completed numerous research projects including the development of a formal methodology to support the discovery of potentially interesting knowledge from large collections of data, development of tools to extract information from text documents, development of computational methods for learning action rules, and the development of a mathematical model for representing sequential data. An ongoing research project is the design and development of computational methods to analyze and detect items of interest in biological sequences. Dr. Johnsten's research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Mitchell Cancer Institute, and GE Healthcare.
Publications
https://www.southalabama.edu/colleges/soc/computerscience/resources/johnstencv.pdf
CFITS Director
School of Computing
University of South Alabama
jtmcdonald@southalabama.edu
Dr. Todd McDonald is a CFITS Director and a Professor in the School of Computing at the University of South Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Florida State University in 2006. His research interests include software and hardware protection, obfuscation, malware analysis, cyber situational awareness, and secure software engineering. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles in conferences and journals related to cyber security. Dr. McDonald is currently the Principle Investigator on a five year $2.1 M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for educating Cyber Scholars and is the Principle Investigator for a two year $450K NSF grant for research computing infrastructure. He is the organizer of the ACM SIGPLAN Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop, is an associate editor for the Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation and Journal of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, and has served on several program committees including the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (AReS), International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), and International Conference on Information Warfare (ICIW).
Publications
Publications
Dr. Jordan Shropshire is a Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Technology at the University of South Alabama. His research centers on the technical and strategic aspects of cloud and infrastructure security. His research is funded by organizations such as the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense, Cisco, IBM, and Red Hat. Dr. Shropshire has published articles in journals such as European Journal of Information Systems, Computers & Security, and Journal of Computer Information Systems. He has served as reviewer and ad hoc associate editor for journals such as MIS Quarterly, European Journal of Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, and Information Systems Research. He has presented research and provides reviews for conferences such as America’s Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and Hawaiian International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS). Dr. Shropshire completed his PhD from Mississippi State University and his B.S. from the University of Florida.
Publications
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iJe6tG0AAAAJ&hl=en
