Rate My Professor Chad Williams

Chad Williams is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Central Connecticut State University, where he also serves as the Point of Contact for the university's Cybersecurity Center of Academic Excellence and co-coordinator of the Cybersecurity B.S. and M.S. programs. He previously held the position of Department Chair from 2019 to 2025. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010, focusing on privacy-preserving machine learning and data mining algorithms for modeling individual activity patterns as part of an NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science with distinction from DePaul University in 2006, with thesis work on detecting profile injection attacks in collaborative recommender systems, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1998. Prior to academia, he worked in software engineering and cybersecurity as a technical architect, project manager, and consultant for Fortune 500 companies in financial services, including Accenture and BlueMeteor Inc. His academic career includes an Assistant Professorship at Bemidji State University from 2010 to 2011 before joining Central Connecticut State University as Assistant Professor in 2011, advancing to Associate Professor in 2020. He has developed 11 courses in computer science, software engineering, and cybersecurity and co-created the Cybersecurity B.S. program, contributing to the university's designations as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations and Cyber Defense by the NSA.