Introduction and Background

I am Chad Williams, an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and co-coordinator of the Cybersecurity Center at Central Connecticut State University, designated a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity (CAE-CD). I have industry experience as technical architect and project lead in developing secure systems for Fortune 500 companies across several sectors of the financial services industry.

Teaching Experience

In my tenure as an educator, I’ve taught a diverse array of courses in computer science, software engineering, and cybersecurity. Details on courses taught can be found in the teaching section. Notably, I’ve developed 11 courses focused on cybersecurity, software engineering, and core computer science topics, contributing to the creation of the Cybersecurity B.S. program with concentration options of both Cyber Defense and Cyber Operations. As a result our university has the distinction of being one of the few in the country that offers National Security Agency (NSA) validated Program of Study in both Cyber Defense and Cyber Operations. I am passionate about teaching and inspiring inpiring a love for learning and computer science in my students, guiding them toward success in both their academic pursuits and future careers. I’ve been honored to receive the university’s Excellence in Teaching Award semi-finalist designation twice and being named to the Excellence in Teaching Honor Roll nearly every year since joining Central.

Research and External Funding

Beyond the university classroom, I’ve successfully secured over $1.1 million in external funding as PI or co-PI from renowned organizations like the NSF, NSA, and Google. These grants have focused on a variety of initiatives, including increasing the number of K-12 girls pursuing careers in STEM fields, creating pathways for middle and high school students to explore cybersecurity, providing opportunities for first-generation and underrepresented populations to obtain graduate degrees, and supporting the dissemination of successful teaching practices to institutions across the country. Currently, my research interests are focused on enhancing computer science and interdisciplinary teaching methods, as well as machine learning and data mining, with a specific emphasis on intrusion detection and interdisciplinary applications. More information about these can be found with the projects and publications.

My Path to Academia

My interest in research and pursuing an academic career stemmed from a rewarding undergraduate research experience with Robbert van Renesse and Ken Birman. However, I recognized that my favorite professors were the ones that could relate what they were teaching to their actual professional experience. So before continuing my path to academia, I focused on developing diverse and high-quality technical professional experience as efficiently as possible. I acheived this as a technical architect and project manager with a passion for finding ways technical advances could be applied to a variety of industries. In these roles I led the development of secure systems for several Fortune 500 companies across the banking, insurance, capital markets, and credit reporting industries. After gaining this background, I completed my Master’s program at DePaul University working with Bamshad Mobasher developing what has become the seminal work on profile injection attack detection for securing open systems such as collaborative recommender systems. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, as part of National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. The IGERT program was NSF’s flagship program for developing researchers with specialized training to prepare them for collaborating and researching in the interdisciplinary fields of the future. As an IGERT Fellow my research examined the emerging interdisciplinary field of Computational Transportation under the guidance of Ph.D. advisors from both CS (Peter Nelson) and Transportation (Abolfazl “Kouros” Mohammadian). My research led to advances in privacy-preserving machine learning and data mining algorithms related to projecting transportation and activity patterns that you see in phones and transportation surveys today. Put simply where I am today is the result of these inspiring mentors along the way, and it is my goal to pay this mentorship forward in helping my students achieve their long term dreams.