Faculty Fellows FY21

Dr. Gao was recruited from the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. His research centers on security, privacy, and systems. Dr. Gao’s work focuses on creating secure and privacy-preserving systems to solve real-world challenges, especially in the domains of threat protection, threat intelligence, blockchain, trustworthy AI, and privacy-enhancing technologies. His CCI work will further cybersecurity research using techniques such as machine learning, natural language processing, program analysis, and network science.

Dr. Ghani is joining the software team at VMI’s DoD Cyber Defense Laboratory. His expertise is secure software engineering. His CCI work will involve the construction of secure IoT cloud to be used for both research and education.

Ms. Travis previously served as a Major in the U.S. Air Force with her most recent appointment as US Cyber Command Officer in Charge, Cyber Operations. She received an M.S. in Cybersecurity from Johns Hopkins University. Her expertise includes cybersecurity planning and strategy, cybersecurity incident handling, network security architecture, and endpoint security architecture. Her CCI work will further connect students and faculty in CCI SWVA via designing and employing new experiential learning opportunities.

Dr. Vance was recruited from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA where he led the Fox School of Business’ Center for Cybersecurity. He was Danny & Elsa Lui Distinguished Associate Professor at University of Hawaiʻi and held appointments at Brigham Young University. Dr. Vance earned Ph.D. degrees in Information Systems from Georgia State University, USA; in Management Science from the University of Paris—Dauphine, France; and in Information Processing Science from the University of Oulu, Finland. He also worked as a cybersecurity consultant at Deloitte. Dr. Vance’s research program focuses on behavioral and organizational aspects of security as well as neuroscience applications to cybersecurity. His CCI work will explore human-cyber security vulnerabilities in a lab setting.

Dr. Venkatesh was recruited from the University of Arkansas where he served as Distinguished Professor and Billingsley Chair of Information Systems. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and is widely recognized as one of the most influential scholars in business and economics with over 116,000 Google citations and more than 100 publications. He regularly ranks in the top three information systems researchers in the world and has held the number one ranking for publishing in the top two journals in the field for the past 5, 10 and 20 years. Dr. Venkatesh is best known for his technology adoption and diffusion research which in recent years has been applied to security, privacy and trust, especially in reference to large data breaches. His CCI work will involve establishment of the Data Breach Research Lab.

Dr. Xiong was recruited from Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Previously, she received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University. Her research focuses on leveraging hardware to build secure systems to enhance the security of computer systems as well as identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities that are rooted in hardware design. Dr. Xiong’s recent work includes Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), cryptographic applications leveraging physical properties of hardware, security verification of processor architectures, and attacks and mitigations of timing channels in caches. Her CCI work will further these efforts to provide secure systems