
General Information
Biography
Dr. Matthew Hale is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity at University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) in the School of Interdisciplinary Informatics, College of Information Science and Technology. Dr. Hale received his PhD from the University of Tulsa (TU) where he worked with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) on the creation of formal certification tools to provide information assurance capabilities to cloud-based information systems in a way that spans federal government and private regulatory documents. This work produced a formal verification language called Cloud X-UNITY and an interchangeable XML Schema for Security SLA specification called SecAgreement. His current research interests focus on the intersectionality between security, web services, software engineering, and behavioral psychology. Since joining UNO in 2014, Dr. Hale has received nearly $5.3 Million in grant funding, ($992k as PI), from NSF, NSA, DARPA, USDoT, and others. Currently active projects include CyberTrust, a research platform for exploring the psychology of phishing, identifying behavioral and structural antecedents of trust, and providing targeted personalized training to prevent future victimization, Scholarship for Service, an NSF-funded project to train the next generation of cybersecurity public servants, Nebraska GenCyber, an NSA/NSF-funded STEM-education effort that has trained over 60 area high school teachers to teach cybersecurity topics in their classrooms and has impacted over 2000 students, Patching life-critical systems, a DARPA-funded effort to improve patch verification and validations for IoT, and Nuclear Weapons Certification Analysis, a project working with NSRI, USSTRATCOM and OSD/Nuclear Matters on nuclear system security. Dr. Hale served as the 2019-2020 Faculty Senate President for UNO and has been actively engaged in a variety of service initiatives around the UNO Campus. In his spare time, Dr. Hale enjoys a love of cooking, which he thinks isn't all that different from software engineering (e.g. components, connectors, and patterns), web development, philosophy, and tabletop and creative story-telling games – mainly D&D.
Teaching Interests
Secure Web Application Development, Secure IoT Applications, Information Security and Policy, Capstone Projects
Research Interests
Online privacy and security, Preventing phishing and social media scams, Internet of Things and Mobile Security, Cloud-based Web Services, Compliance certification
Service Summary
IS&T Personnel Committee Member (2020-present), IS&T Personnel Committee Chair (2021-2022), CYBR Program Committee (2014 - present), IS&T Advisory Committee Chair (2017 - present), Faculty Senate Representative for the College of IS&T (2018-2020), Faculty Senate President for UNO (2019-2020)