Dr. Beck is a faculty member in the Computer and Cyber Sciences at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). Dr. Beck's teaching interests span all levels of computer science, from introductory courses to supervising independent studies and capstone projects related to experimental systems. Dr. Beck is the department's STEM outreach coordinator. Dr. Beck leads the outreach efforts, reaching out to over 2800 students in the 2021-2022 academic year. Awarded a $100K external grant specifically for STEM outreach through the Daniels Fund, Dr. Beck has a team of two VSFS interns working on gamification for cybersecurity middle-school outreach.

Dr. Shannon Beck is a member of the Federal-level NIST National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) K-12 Community of Interest, where she has led a sub-committee and served in multiple roles. Dr. Beck founded Cyber VA, working with Virginia high-school teachers and students to create career awareness and to infuse cybersecurity across the education portfolio, where they created an inclusive and approachable cybersecurity survey course, targeting 9th-12th grade students in Virginia, shared at the peer-reviewed NIST NICE K-12 conference. Dr. Beck also served through the review and expansion of the TeachCyber.org year-long dual-credit high school and undergraduate curriculum content, as well as on many program and review committees including SIGCSE, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and multiple parallel and bioinformatics conferences.

Dr. Beck worked for over a decade at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Work includes DoD software development and system integration, bioinformatics, database solutions, and on cyber security defensive operations. Dr. Beck led multiple Department of Energy Cyber Fire training courses at week-long events, where she co-created the Entry Point training track to on-board professionals new to defensive cyber security. Dr. Beck served as the Program Coordinator and Associate Program Director for the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), helping manage one of the largest and most-interdisciplinary funding programs at the NSF with over 1,000 actively funded projects.

She has taught multiple undergraduate and masters-level courses for educators for teaching cybersecurity, including one at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, New Mexico. Dr. Beck co-led an NSA-funded GenCyber Camp at the University of Maryland in the summer of 2021. Dr. Beck created and led a multi-weekend workshop in the spring of 2022 for high school teachers that uses the Raspberry Pi platform for cybersecurity education. Dr. Beck was invited to speak at the advanced GenCyber teacher camp at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs in the summer of 2022. She is the lead organizer for the upcoming Jean Bartik Computing Symposium (JBCS) for women and minorities in computing at the service academies that takes place in February 2023.

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

United States Air Force Academy, Assistant Professor, 2021-current

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

USAFA Outstanding New Faculty Award, 2021-2022

USAFA Dean of Faculty Departmental Award and Engineering Division Award for 2021-Q4