Jorge Crichigno

Dr. Crichigno joined the Integrated Information Technology (IIT) Department at the University of South Carolina (USC) in January, 2018. Before coming to UofSC, Dr. Crichigno was a faculty member in the College of Engineering and Technology at Northern New Mexico College. Dr. Crichigno has also served as a research associate at the Electrical Engineering Department at University of South Florida and at the Florida Center for Cybersecurity since 2016. 

Dr. Crichigno's research is focused on practical implementation of Science DMZs. This includes the design and implementation of high-speed switched networks, TCP optimization, and experimental evaluation of congestion control algorithms such as BBR, HTCP, and Cubic. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other agencies. In this regard, he has led the design, development, and testing of a 10 Gbps Science DMZ in New Mexico. 

Dr. Crichigno’s work also includes the development of material for teaching and research in computer networks and cybersecurity. He is the Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded project “Building a Cybersecurity Pipeline through Experiential Virtual Labs and Workforce Alliances.” The project’s goals are: 1) to develop scalable and replicable virtual laboratory experiences for cybersecurity education; 2) to create an internship program in alliance with the private sector and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in efforts to bolster national security.

Elie Kfoury

Elie Kfoury is an Assistant Professor in the College of Engineering and Computing at the University of South Carolina (USC). His research lies at the intersection of network programmability, performance, and security, with a focus on P4 programmable data planes, Data Processing Units (DPUs)/SmartNICs, and accelerated packet-processing architectures. As a member of the CILab at USC, Dr. Kfoury develops virtual laboratories and training materials that enhance education and research in high-speed networking, TCP congestion control, programmable switches, software-defined networking, and cybersecurity. He earned his Ph.D. in Informatics from USC in 2023. 

Nik Sultana

Nik Sultana is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. He develops networking techniques to improve cybersecurity and research infrastructure. Before joining Illinois Tech, he was a post-doc at UPenn after completing his PhD at Cambridge University. In 2024 and 2023 he received VSP awards from the Universities Research Association, and in 2022 he received a Google Research Award. 

Kuang-Ching (KC) Wang

Professor Kuang-Ching “KC” Wang is Empire Innovation Professor of Trustworthy AI and Director of the School of Computing at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science at Binghamton University. Prior to Binghamton, Wang served at Clemson University as Provost Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and held numerous leadership roles, including the C. Tycho Howle Endowed Chair in Collaborative Computing, Associate Director of Research for the Watt Family Innovation Center, Co-director of the Clemson AI Research Institute, and Executive Director of Clemson STRIDE, an NSF Accelerating Research Translation program. 

Wang was born and raised in Taiwan, and he came to the United States for his PhD study at University of Wisconsin - Madison. He began his faculty career at Clemson and spent the next two decades building and leading an exciting breadth of collaborative research with researchers across U.S. and the globe. His research centers on computing and networking systems, developing innovative solutions for applications in artificial intelligence, healthcare, cyber-physical systems and cybersecurity.

Wang has led more than $100 million sponsored research, leading multi-university teams to build NSF FABRIC and NSF CloudLab — the nation’s most advanced Internet and distributed cloud computing systems. Powered by such unprecedented scale of computing and networking capabilities, Dr. Wang has committed his research to the mission of transforming our healthcare with pervasive AI technologies.

Wang is passionate about educating students beyond discipline boundaries. He founded Watt AI, a campus-wide AI education program that teaches AI to students from any major and enables them to work on applied AI research with professors from different colleges.

Yufeng Xin 

Yufeng Xin is the Assistant Director at Network Research and Infrastructure Group (NRIG), RENCI, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on advanced networking, cloud computing, mobile networks, and their applications to cyber physical systems (CPS). He obtained his PhD in Operations Research and Computer Science from North Carolina State University.