Faculty and Staff

Sherif E. Abdelhamid serves as an Assistant Professor at the Computer and Information Sciences Department. Before joining VMI, he was an Assistant Professor at the College of Computing and Information Technology (AAST - Smart Village Campus, Egypt). He was also an Infrastructure Software Engineer at the Center for Open Science, Virginia, USA.

He obtained his Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from AAST - Alexandria Campus, Egypt.

Sherif's research work spans three main fields, Computer Science, STEM Education, and Public Health. His research interests are in high-performance services-based computing solutions, novel digital educational technologies, and tools for the social network analysis of complex systems. More specifically, his research focuses on designing and building software systems and services (science-as-service) that enable students and domain experts from various fields to access and interact with various learning resources easily and perform data analyses and simulations to study large-scale biological information socio-technical (BIST) complex systems.

Mohamed Azab is an assistant professor in the computer and information sciences department. 

Mohamed received his doctorate in computer engineering in 2013 from The Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, USA.

He has multiple provisional patents, book chapters among various publications in archival journals and respected conference proceedings.

His research interests lie in the area of cybersecurity and trustworthy engineering ranging from theory to design and implementation. His recent research crosscuts the areas of Software Defined Networking (SDN) architectures and protocols, high performance and cloud computing, ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT), and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS).

Mohamed is the founder of the Cyber Security and IoT lab hosting Mohamed’s Ph.D. and Masters students' research activities.

Mohamed acted as a keynote speaker in multiple prestigious conferences. He served on multiple conference and workshop program and steering committees.

Mohamed’s publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pOxASp0AAAAJ&hl=

Imran Ghani is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering at VMI. He received his Ph.D. from Kookmin University (South Korea) in 2010, M.S Computer Science from UTM (Malaysia) in 2007, and Master of Information Technology Degree from UAAR (Pakistan) in 2002. Dr. Ghani has more than 5 years of industrial experience. He has a great deal of experience in Agile software development frameworks, models and processes including Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP and hybrid models and processes. He worked in several software houses focusing on web development, databases, requirements engineering, and software testing. In 2019, he published a textbook, "Introduction to PHP Web Services: PHP, Javascript, MySQL, SOAP, RESTful, JSON, XML, WSDL" which is currently available on Amazon.com. Dr. Ghani is an active researcher with over 120+ publications in peer-reviewed quality journals and conference proceedings. His research interests include agile software development, secure software engineering, and semantic web.

Mr. David Jones is the Cyber Security Scientist for the Cyber defense Lab. He holds a bachelor’s in business administration –information systems from California State University, Fresno and is pursuing a Master of Science Cybersecurity from Webster University. Mr. Jones has fourteen years of Healthcare critical infrastructure and 2 years of banking critical infrastructure information security experience. From 2018 to 2021 he served as the Director of information technology at Southern Virginia University. From 2013 to 2018 he ran his own software company specializing in 3D Mine Ventilation and Fire simulation software and web-based analytic dashboards for Fresno and Madera Unified School Districts 

Mr. Jones currently maintains the following professional certifications: CompTIA Security+, Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

Lt. Col. Youna Jung is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Virginia Military Institute. She received her Ph.D. degree from Ajou University in South Korea in 2007 and then worked at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Florida as a research faculty. Her research interests include multiagent systems, context/situation-aware computing, collaborative computing, disaster computing, health informatics, access control, privacy, cybersecurity, and so on.

Associate Professor
Computer and Information Sciences

Adjunct Professor
Computer and Information Sciences

Associate Professor
Computer and Information Sciences

Maj. Doug Wainwright is the CIS Department IT Manager and Instructor. He earned an MDE in Distance Education at University of Maryland University College (UMUC). He came to VMI after 24 years in IT and Cybersecurity providing network engineering services and information security compliance support for DoD, DoJ, and DHS. From 1996 to 2013 Doug worked in support of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) as a System Administrator, and Network Engineer integrating and troubleshooting DoD network encryption equipment in Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) enclaves. 

As a Communications Security (COMSEC) Custodian, he developed training courses and provided instruction in the integration and operation of DoD network encryption equipment to active duty military personnel and government contractors. 

Served as VMI Information Security Officer (ISO) from 2014 to 2016. Responsible for the VMI information security operations, maintenance, and compliance with State of Virginia standards. 

Major Wainwright is an Adjunct Instructor for the UMUC Cybersecurity undergraduate program teaching online classes.

Major Wainwright currently maintains the following professional certifications: Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and CompTIA Security+

IT Manager
Computer and Information Sciences