Mohammad I Husain

Dr. Mohammad Husain is a Professor and the Inaugural Director of the PolySec Cyber Lab, a Center for Cyber Security and Forensics Education, Research, and Outreach in the Department of Computer Science at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), CA. He has over ten years’ experience in leadership, development, and administration of Computer Science and Cyber Security academic and co-curricular programs at a comprehensive university. He has significant leadership experience in extramural funding, graduate program, financial and strategic planning, assessment and accreditation, faculty governance, and building academic vision in diverse academic environments. His academic vision and leadership skills have resulted in state and national-level programs and diverse academic settings across multiple institutions. At Cal Poly Pomona, he is the Principal Investigator (PI) of ten externally funded grants and co-PI of three externally funded grants totaling $18.4M. In addition, he served as senior personnel for three externally funded grants totaling over $9.7M.

Dr. Husain’s administrative leadership includes the Program Directorship of the Cal-Bridge Computer Science (CS) program, a California State University (CSU)-University of California (UC) Ph.D. pathway program for Computer Science and Engineering students from underrepresented minority communities. Dr. Husain leads the steering committee comprised of six CSUs, six UCs, and one community college. The program was launched in Fall 2020 and recruited 40 CSU students successfully. The first two cohorts have been placed in PhD programs at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz. He is also the founding organizing chair of the SFSCon, a national cybersecurity training workshop for the CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) students. In Fall 2021, around 141 CyberCorps SFS students (BS/MS/Ph.D.) from 42 different US universities participated in this 2-day training.

As a part of the NSF CyberCorps SFS grant, he has trained students in Cyber Security and placed them at the NSA, DHS, NASA, MITRE, Sandia lab, Aerospace Corp., MIT Lincoln Lab, US Airforce, US Army, and US Navy since 2015. As a part of the ONR grant, he has trained 45 Navy, Marine, and Army ROTC cadets from the following schools: USC, UCLA, UCSD, USD, SDSU, Point Loma, CSU San Marcos, and CPP. As the administrative lead of these grants, Dr. Husain has also managed over 30+ faculty and staff since 2015.

As an academic leader at Cal Poly Pomona, Dr. Husain has led multiple university IT initiatives: Cyber Security Cluster Hiring (2017), Big Data Interdisciplinary Scholarly Community (2018), High-Performance Computing Lab (2017), Virtual Reality Lab (2017), and Malware Analysis & Security Operations Center (2018). He is the current co-chair of CPP Academic Senate Academic Programs committee since 2024.  Additionally, he has served on the Executive Committee (2019) and Academic Affairs committee of the CPP Academic Senate (2015-19), as well as on the University Academic Master Plan Committee (2016). Dr. Husain also served as the founding faculty advisor of ACM-W chapter CPP SheCodes through support from the National Center of Women in IT (2016). This chapter's strategic recruitment and retention program have resulted in a 21% increase in female applicants to the CS program in 2020. He has held leadership positions at the department level on the following committees: Retention Tenure and Promotion (RTP), Laboratory, Scholarship, and Graduate Committee. He is the CS Graduate committee's current chair and has been in charge of the MS in Computer Science program since 2015.

Dr. Husain has more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and over 50 technical publications, including two co-authored book chapters in the domain of Cyber Security and Forensics. His research on Brainwave authentication was assigned a US patent (USPTO 10,198,566) and covered by Time magazine and PC magazine. Dr. Husain is a member of various professional organizations: IEEE, ACM, and Usenix (2015-present). He served as the publicity chair of the International Conference on Security Knowledge Management (2019) and a member of the technical program committee of IEEE WCNC (2014-present), WASA (2013-14), ICCVE (2013-14), and WTS (2013). He has served as a reviewer for National Science Foundation (NSF), IEEE Transactions on Secure and Distributed Computing (2013), IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (2013), and Elsevier Ad hoc Networks Journal (2012).

He earned an MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2012. Dr. Husain is the recipient of the 2016 College of Science Distinguished Teaching Award and was awarded early promotion and tenure in 2016. Cal Poly Pomona also selected Dr. Husain as its 2020 Faculty Learning Community for Leadership pipeline development cohort.