Meet our Team
Lori Scarlatos is Principal Investigator on the project at Stony Brook University (SBU). Dr. Scarlatos is an associate professor in the Department of Technology and Society, and affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, at Stony Brook University. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Educational Technology Systems. Her research focuses on the use of computing technology to enhance learning and understanding, such as educational games and simulations, learning activities with tangible user interfaces, collaborative learning, and information visualization. She has collaborated with Secure Decisions on a prior NSF grant, teaching middle school students about cybersecurity, and the DHS grant that lead to the creation of Comic-BEE. She has worked on other projects, funded by NSF and Motorola, that aim to broaden participation in computing. She has also presented her educational games research to teachers at the Celebration of Technology in Education, the PBS Celebration of Teaching and Learning, and National Science Teachers' Association. Some of the applications she has worked on have been distributed through Eastern Suffolk BOCES, and she has had her projects installed at the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Science and the San Antonio Children’s Museum.
Laurin Buchanan is Principal Investigator on the project for Secure Decisions. Ms. Buchanan spent two decades managing IT operations and information security in the corporate sector and now uses that operational to lead R&D efforts at Secure Decisions for novel solutions to improve cybersecurity decision making by humans. She has conceived of and led a number of cybersecurity education projects, including Comic-BEE, a web application for creating interactive, branching comics for cybersecurity education and evaluation that accommodates diverse age and expertise levels. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional, she served as a subject matter expert during initial development of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Workforce Framework and is now an active member the NICE Working Group. She serves on the Advisory Board for Suffolk County Community College’s cybersecurity degree program and was recently a subject matter expert contributor to a course-specific standards panel as part of the Competency-Based Education curriculum development project from the National CyberWatch Center’s Curriculum Standards Panel.
Nick Nikiforakis and Michalis Polychronakis, both faculty at SBU and core faculty of the National Security Institute (NSI), will deliver timely research-based instruction on cybersecurity to the teachers during the summer workshops. The mission of the NSI is to secure the U.S. by conducting research, and developing technologies and insights, that are necessary for secure, trustworthy and widely available communications and computing platforms. Dr. Nick Nikiforakis works on analysis of online ecosystems; measurement and countermeasures against unwanted tracking; assessment of the security of remote servers; and client-side defense mechanisms against phishing and web attacks. Dr. Michalis Polychronakis works on protections against software vulnerability exploitation, malware analysis and detection, online privacy and anonymity, network traffic monitoring, and intrusion detection.
