Researcher Profiles
USA CFITS has assembled a talented team of researchers whose interests are profiled below.
Mr. Les Barnett
CFITS Director
School of Computer & Information Sciences
University of South Alabama
Mr. Barnett holds a Bachelors degree from the University of South Alabama, where he has served for the past decade on the Advisory Board for the School of Computer & Information Sciences. 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 March 2005, he helped 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. In 2007, Les was appointed to the Alabama Educational Television Commission by Governor Bob Riley, where he currently serves as the commissioner from the First Congressional District.
Dr. Bob Sweeney
Associate Professor
School of Computer & Information Sciences
University of South Alabama
Dr. Sweeney received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems in 1994 from the University of Memphis. His research interests include web application security and object-oriented analysis and design.
Dr. Alec Yasinsac
Dean and Professor
School of Computer & Information Sciences
University of South Alabama
Dr. Yasinsac received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996 from the University of Virginia. His research interests include security protocols, wireless security, mobile agents, electronic voting, tamper-resistant software, intrusion detection, digital forensics, privacy, and cybertrust.
Dr. Jingshan Huang
Assistant Professor
School of Computer & Information Sciences
University of South Alabama
Dr. Huang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in May 2007 from the University of South Carolina. His research interests include machine intelligence, ontology matching, and semantic integration.
Dr. Natalia Stakhanova
Assistant Professor
School of Computer & Information Sciences
University of South Alabama
Dr. Stakhanova received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from Iowa State University. Her research interests include systems and network security, trust management, intrusion detection, and computer networking.
Dr. Jeffrey McDonald
Assistant Professor
School of Computer & Information Sciences
University of South Alabama
Dr. Jeffrey "Todd" McDonald received his Ph.D. in computer science from Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, 2006. He received his Master of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 2000 and his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the U. S. Air Force Academy in 1990. He served as an Assistant Professor and Chair of Computer Science and Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2010. In 2011, he joined the University of South Alabama and the School of CIS as an Associate Professor of computer science. He has published around 25 refereed conference papers and journals related to secure programming, software and hardware-based protection, cyber defense, and agent-based security. He has graduated 13 Master’s students and served on 10 thesis committees. Dr. McDonald has shared in $1M of prior grant funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Cyber Command-Provisional, and Air Force Research Laboratory to investigate software protection, cyber defense, and FPGA security. He retired from the U.S. Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel after serving over 21 years as a communications-information/cyberspace operations officer specializing in cyber systems defense, research, and education. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, Eta Kappa Nu, Upsilon Pi Epsilon and a past member of the Military Operations Research Society.