About Me

A liberal arts education at Berea College changed the direction of my life. Studying computer science alongside philosophy taught me to connect technical understanding with questions about knowledge, power, and responsibility. Just as influential were professors who took an interest in my ideas, challenged me, and helped me see possibilities I had not imagined for myself. Their attention gave me the confidence to pursue difficult questions and eventually become a professor. I try to offer my students that same combination of intellectual challenge, encouragement, and room to develop interests of their own.

I earned my B.A. at Berea College, where I studied philosophy and computer science. I later earned my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Arizona State University. Before joining Hampden-Sydney College, I taught at Washington & Lee University and the University of New Mexico and held an Open Technology Fund-supported Senior Information Controls Fellowship at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.

My research investigates the gap between the protections a system promises and those it provides in practice. My collaborators and I study VPN vulnerabilities, trust in mobile applications, and the ways network behavior can expose or compromise communication even when the underlying encryption remains intact. This work has appeared at USENIX Security and FOCI and has informed coordinated vulnerability disclosures. Through Breakpointing Bad, I also help develop research and tools that support Internet freedom.

In my teaching, students learn by investigating systems closely enough to explain what they observe. They examine memory and machine instructions, build Linux systems, and experiment with censorship and circumvention in virtual networks. My courses connect this technical work with questions about power, responsibility, and human agency. In Applied AI: Systems, Decisions, & Society, for example, students build predictive models and examine what their results actually justify, who bears the cost of errors, and when a technical answer is inadequate to the problem.

At Hampden-Sydney, I lead work on computer science curriculum development and mentor undergraduate researchers. Students from Hampden-Sydney and Washington & Lee have coauthored peer-reviewed publications with me, including a student who published two papers in his first year of college. I want students to gain confidence through work that asks them to develop questions, test explanations, and defend their conclusions.

My broader interests include information theory, philosophy, and the history of computing. Students interested in research and colleagues looking to collaborate are welcome to get in touch.