Meet The Team Members
PSU, OSU and UO are founding universities of the OCCoE that co-lead all the center activities.
Leadership Team
BIROL YESILADA
Director
BIROL YESILADA
Birol A. Yeşilada is a professor of Political Science and International Studies at the Hatfield School of Government at PSU. He is the Founding Director of the Oregon Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. Previously, he was the Director of the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, Director of the Center for Turkish Studies, and holder of the endowed chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies. He served as Vice President of the International Studies Association and is a TransResearch Consortium Executive Board member. He received a B.A. in Neurobiology in 1977 from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in Political Science in 1979 from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1984 from the University of Michigan. His currently funded research projects focus on power transition, cybersecurity/cyber defense policy, the European Union, and world values survey. His recent publications include eleven books, over 40 articles, and book chapters. In 2024, he received Portland State University’s highest award – the Presidential Career Research Award. In 2003, he was invited by the White House to participate in the commission that drafted the new constitution of Afghanistan. Professor Yeşilada has been an invited national security policy consultant for the U.S. administrations and an invited subject matter expert at the World Bank, Council on Foreign Relations, Booz Allen Hamilton, Nathan Associates, and Barclays Capital.
Reza Rejaie
Associate Director
REZA REJAIE
Reza Rejaie is a Professor and Department Head at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oregon. Reza is also a founding Associate Director of Oregon Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (OCCoE) and leads all the center activities at UO. Reza joined UO in 2002 and founded Oregon Network Research Group (ONRG) in 2004. He received a NSF CAREER Award for his work on P2P streaming in 2005, and a European Union Marie Curie Fellowship in 2009. Reza has been a visiting professor at Sorbonne University, the Politecnico di Torino, and IMDEA Networks Institute. Reza’s research in the area of network measurement, cybersecurity, congestion control, multimedia networking, P2P networking and social computing have been widely cited. Reza has served on the editorial board of several journals, review panels and technical program committee of numerous conferences. Reza has also served as an expert witness and technology consultant, and engaged in partnerships with industry collaborators for deployment projects. He is a Fellow of IEEE (2017) for contributions to multimedia and peer-to-peer networking and Internet measurement, and a Distinguished member of the ACM (2022) for Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Computing.Prior to joining UO, Reza was a Senior Technical Staff member at AT&T Labs-Research for three years. Reza received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1996 and 1999, respectively. Reza’s Ph.D. dissertation was supervised by Deborah Estrin and Mark Handley. During his graduate study at USC, he participated in several research projects at Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the Computer Networks and Distributed Systems Research Laboratory, and the Database Laboratory. He completed his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1991.
Rakesh Bobba
Associate Director
RAKESH BOBBA
Rakesh B. Bobba is an associate professor in the School of EECS. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park in 2007 and 2009 respectively. Prior to joining Oregon State in 2014, he was a research assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with appointments in ITI, ECE, and CS departments. Rakesh Bobba’s research interests are in the design of secure and trustworthy networked and distributed computer systems, with a current focus on cyber-physical critical infrastructures, real-time systems, and image privacy. He has co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in premier conferences and journals in his field. Bobba’s research has been supported by DOE, ARPA-E, ONR, AFRL/AFOSR, and NSF.
Tugrul Daim
Professor, PSU
TUGRUL DAIM
Professor Daim leads a research group on Technology Evaluations and Research Applications. His group has had more than 25 PhD graduates. He is currently advising more than 15 PhD students. More than 15 visiting scholars from all around the world have joined his group in the last decade. Professor Daim is recognized worldwide for his research leadership in roadmapping and forecasting technologies.
JOSÉ DOMÍNGUEZ
Chief Security Information Officer, UO
JOSÉ DOMÍNGUEZ
José is a dynamic and visionary leader who sees technology and people as part of a symbiotic environment and brings them together to propel forward an organization’s mission and vision. He brings a balanced approach to risk appetite, risk management, return on investments and people-centric initiatives to promote digital transformation.
With over 30 years of experience working in technology, José currently serves as the Chief Information Security Officer at the University of Oregon (UO), where he is responsible for defining cybersecurity strategy and operations. He leads teams managing information security risk and compliance, IT security services and operations, IT disaster recovery, security incident response and the university’s Cyber Security Operations Center.
Before taking on his current role, José served as the Interim CISO and Director of Information Security Services & Operations at UO. These positions entailed responsibilities for security architecture and solutions design, threat defense, vulnerability management, investigations and digital forensics, security monitoring, intelligence sharing and incident response.
Earlier in his career, José was actively dedicated to building secure research and educational networks. He has served as Network Architect for the University of Oregon, Director of the Network for Education & Research in Oregon, the Oregon Gigapop and the Oregon Internet Exchange.
José holds an undergraduate degree in Systems Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and has worked on projects for the Organization of American States and the World Bank to increase access to technology for K-12 and higher education institutions in several countries. José also collaborates with the UO’s Network Startup Resource Center and the Escuela Latino-Americana de Redes ( EsLaRed ) providing strategic training and technical advice for security and networking projects in emerging markets.
Dave Nevin
Assistant Professor of Practice, OSU
DAVE NEVIN
Dave Nevin leads the Oregon Research & Teaching Security Operations Center (ORTSOC) at Oregon State University. Newly formed, the ORTSOC is designed to educate and train the next generation of the cybersecurity workforce while providing core operational security, information sharing, and analysis for participating organizations across the region. He is currently an Instructor in the Cybersecurity Program as well, teaching CS477 Introduction to Digital Forensics both in person and online.
Dave served as Oregon State University’s first full-time Chief Information Security Officer from 2012-2018. He holds the CISSP (since 2004) and is a certified forensics technician. His areas of specialization include regulatory compliance, policy, incident response, security operations, computer forensics, and disaster recovery and business continuity. Dave is very active in Higher Ed InfoSec both regionally and nationally, having recently served on the Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC) Leadership Committee and as co-chair of the HEISC Technologies, Operations, and Practices Working Group, amongst others. He has published several white papers and presented numerous times on a variety of Information Security topics during his years in the field.