Bio
Dr. Beck is a faculty member in Computer and Cyber Sciences at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA), with teaching interests spanning introductory courses to capstone projects. As the department’s STEM outreach coordinator, she leads programs reaching over 1,500 students annually and is the PI for a $100K Daniels Fund STEM initiative. She mentors Virtual Student Federal Service interns developing gamified cybersecurity education for middle schoolers at CyberPup.Academy.
Dr. Beck founded Cyber VA to promote cybersecurity awareness, collaborating with Virginia high schools to develop an inclusive cybersecurity survey course for grades 9–12, presented at the NIST NICE K-12 conference. She also edited and expanded TeachCyber.org’s dual-credit curriculum. She has served on program and review committees for SIGCSE, Grace Hopper, and various cybersecurity and bioinformatics conferences.
Previously, Dr. Beck spent over a decade at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on DoD software development, bioinformatics, database solutions, and cybersecurity operations. She led multiple DOE Cyber Fire training courses, co-creating the Entry Point track for new cybersecurity professionals. At the National Science Foundation (NSF), she helped manage the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, overseeing 1,000+ funded projects.
Dr. Beck has taught cybersecurity courses for educators at multiple institutions, co-led an NSA-funded GenCyber Camp hosted at the University of Maryland, Global Campus, and designed a Raspberry Pi-based cybersecurity workshop for high school teachers. As an invited speaker, she presented at advanced GenCyber teacher camps and served as general chair for the 2023 Jean Bartik Computing Symposium (JBCS), continuing to contribute in 2022 and 2024 on the organizing committee.
Dr. Beck's dedication to advancing cybersecurity and computing education is rooted in her expertise across research, education, funding, and cyber operations.
Education
Kent State University
Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science
Dissertation: Smith-Waterman Sequence Alignment for Massively Parallel High-Performance Computing Architectures Master of Arts, Computer Science
Hiram College
Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science, Phi Beta Kappa
Professional Experience
United States Air Force Academy, Associate Professor (2025-current)
United States Air Force Academy, Assistant Professor (2021-2025)
Cybersecurity education non-profit, Research and Curriculum Lead (2020-2021)
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Cybersecurity Lecturer (2020)
National Science Foundation (NSF) – Program Coordinator and Associate Program Director (2018-2020)
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Scientist (2009-2020)
Kent State University, Graduate Faculty Appointment (2013-2015)
Honors & Awards
GIAC Reverse Engineering Malware (GREM)
Featured Faculty (January 2025)
USAFA Quarterly Award – Civilian (Q2 2023)
USAFA Outstanding New Faculty Award (2021-2022)
USAFA Dean of Faculty Departmental Award and Engineering Division Award (Q4 2021)
Research and Scholarly Interests
Side-channel analysis for wireless power transfer (Qi) charging
Malware interrogation via non-tradition tools for attribution
Malware intrusion analysis frameworks
Publications
Select Recent Publications
“Lawyer Up! Joint Introductory Computer Science and Law Courses,” Beck, Shannon, Timothy Goines, and Jeffrey Biller. Journal Proceedings for the 33rd CCSC Rocky Mountain Conference 2024, Flagstaff, AZ, Oct. 2024.
Shannon Beck, Manohar Raavi, Caleb Dale, Kaija Weishalla, and Brennan Worrell, “Survey of Side-Channel Vulnerabilities for Short-Range Wireless Communication Technologies,” presented at the IEEE International Conference on Electo/Information Technology, Eau Claire, WI: IEEE, Jun. 2024.
Shannon Beck, Gabriella Lowy, and Rodney McCoy, “Cyber Pup: Cybersecurity Awareness Game for Middle School Students,” presented at the NICE K12 Cybersecurity Education Conference, Phoenix, AZ, 12/1-5 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.k12cybersecurityconference.org/news/2024/1/4/2023-nice-k12-conference-recap
J. Maher, S. Beck, A. A. de Freitas, and T. Weingart, “Improving Autonomous Systems Education: A Literature Survey,” in 2022 Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Systems, Las Vegas, NV, Dec. 2022.
J. Coffman, J. M. Hill, S. Beck, A. A. De Freitas, and T. Weingart, “Good Students are Good Students Student Achievement with Visual versus Textual Programming,” in 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), Uppsala, Sweden: IEEE, Oct. 2022, pp. 1–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962693.
M. Dark, S. Beck, J. Daugherty, M. Loepker, and R. Dark, “High School Cybersecurity: Curriculum Concepts, Content, and Course Construction,” in Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Virtual Event USA: ACM, Mar. 2021, pp. 1368–1368. doi: 10.1145/3408877.3439549.
Shannon Beck, Sharon McPherson, and Linda Smith, “Inclusive, Approachable Cybersecurity for 10-12 Graders,” in 2019 NICE K12 Cybersecurity Education Conference, Garden Grove, CA, Dec. 2019.
Black Hat 2017: Shannon Beck and Paul Ferrell, “PcapDB: Optimized Full Network Packet Capture For Fast And Efficient Retrieval,” presented at the Black Hat USA 2017, Las Vegas, NV, Jul. 27, 2017. A tools forum for a conference with over 15,000 attendees.