Lance Hoffman
Lance J. Hoffman is Distinguished Research Professor of Computer Science and the founder of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at The George Washington University (GW) in Washington, D. C., and the author or editor of numerous articles and five books on computer security and privacy. He developed the first regularly offered course in cybersecurity at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. Years later, he and others first conceptualized the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition which now has over 100 participating universities. He has been a leader in pioneering a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to teaching and research in cybersecurity. His teaching innovations include multidisciplinary courses on electronic commerce and network security and the development of a portable educational network for teaching computer security.
His research has spanned multiple aspects of cybersecurity, including models and metrics
for secure computer systems, cryptography policy, risk analysis, computer viruses, societal vulnerability to computer system failures, portable security labs, privacy/data protection, and statistical inference for data mining.
He is the principal investigator for GW’s CyberCorps computer security scholarship program at GW sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation. These programs have produced over seven dozen federal government experts in computer security with degrees in at least ten majors. All have had crossdisciplinary instruction that recognizes cybersecurity as a discipline with technology, policy, and management components, and all have a working knowledge of the privacy issues as well.
A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Cyber Security Hall of Fame, Dr. Hoffman institutionalized the ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in 1992, and has served on a number of Advisory Committees including those of the Center for Democracy and Technology, IBM, and the Federal Trade Commission. He has testified before Congress on security and privacy-related issues.
Dr. Hoffman received his B. S. in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University and his M. S. and Ph. D. from Stanford University in computer science.