Rate My Professor Doug Jacobson

Doug Jacobson is a University Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University of Science and Technology, where he holds the Sunil & Sujata Gaitonde Professorship in Cybersecurity. He also serves as Director of the Center for Cybersecurity Innovation and Outreach. Jacobson earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University in 1985, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1982, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering in 1980, all from the same institution. Having begun his studies at Iowa State as an undergraduate in 1976, he has built a distinguished career focused on advancing cybersecurity education and research at his alma mater.

Jacobson's research specializations encompass computing and networking systems, secure and reliable computing, information assurance, cybersecurity, computer security, cyber physical security, network security, security literacy and education, and security test beds. He launched Iowa State’s Cyber Defense Competitions in 2005, engaging nearly 2,000 university students across 20 contests and thousands more from Iowa high schools, community colleges, and Midwestern institutions. Jacobson developed the $3.5 million Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment (ISEAGE) testbed to facilitate cyber defense studies and has contributed to the establishment of Iowa State’s cyber security engineering major. His outreach initiatives include year-long curricula with books and videos for schools statewide, as well as events like IT-Olympics, providing hands-on training, industry exposure, and career pathways in cybersecurity. Among his recognitions is the IEEE Education Society 2011 Transactions on Education best paper award for “IT-Adventures — A Program to Spark IT Interest in High School Students using Inquiry-Based Learning with Robotics, Game Design, and Cyber Defense” published in 2009. Key publications include “Detecting Fraudulent Use of Cloud Resources” (2011), “Security Analysis of Public Cloud Computing” (2012), and papers on cybersecurity education such as “Building a Cybersecurity Engineering Program? Begin by Cloning Your Computer Engineering Program” (2020) and “Security Across the Curriculum and Beyond” (2012).