Bryson Payne, Ph.D.
Dr. Bryson Payne is an award-winning cyber coach, author, TEDx speaker, and the founding Director of the Center for Cyber Operations Education (now the Institute for Cyber Operations) at the University of North Georgia, an NSA-DHS Center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense. He is a tenured professor of computer science at UNG, where he has taught aspiring coders and cyber professionals since 1998, including coaching UNG’s #1-in-the-nation 2019 & 2020 NSA Codebreaker Challenge cyber operations teams.
Dr. Payne was recognized by the UNG Alumni Association as the 2021 Distinguished Professor, and by the cybersecurity industry association, EC-Council, as the 2021 Academic Instructor of the Year. He has been awarded the Department of the Army Commander’s Award for Public Service medal from U.S. Army Cadet Command, the University System of Georgia Chancellor’s Service Excellence Leader of the Year Award, and the Order of Thor medal from the Military Cyber Professionals Association.
Dr. Payne is a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Certified EC-Council Instructor (CEI), Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), and he holds the elite SANS|GIAC GPEN, GRID, and GREM cybersecurity certifications. He has written over $48 Million in successful grants for workforce development, technology education, and cybersecurity, and he has trained over 60,000 students through his online courses on coding and ethical hacking. He was also the first Department Head of Computer Science at UNG and enjoys working with K-12 schools worldwide to promote computer science and cybersecurity education.
Dr. Payne holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia State University. Featured in the Wall Street Journal, Campus Technology, and CIO magazine, Dr. Payne is the author of Teach Your Kids to Code: A Parent-Friendly Guide to Python Programming (2015), Learn Java the Easy Way (2017), Go Hack Yourself (2022), and Hacking for Kids (2022), all published by No Starch Press.
Payne, B. R. (2017). Learn Java the Easy Way. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press (distributed by Penguin Random House). 344 pages. October 17, 2017. ISBN No. 978-1593278052. Published in English, Polish and Chinese.
Payne, B. R. (2015). Teach Your Kids to Code. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press. 336 pages. May 1, 2015. ISBN No. 978-1593276140. Published in six languages (English, Korean, Portuguese, Polish, Russian and Chinese).
Payne, B. R. (2005). Accelerating Scientific Computation in Bioinformatics by Using Graphics Processing Units as Parallel Vector Processors. (Doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University, 2005). Dissertation Abstracts International (UMI No. AAT 3170179, ISBN No. 0542060167).
Mienie, E.L., Payne, B.R, and Regeski, B.T. (2019). Hybrid Conflict and the Impact of Private Contractors on National Security. In Private Military Security Companies’ Influence on International Security and Foreign Policy, pp. 103-121. University of North Georgia Press. ISBN 978-1940771687
Payne, B.R, Parker, V.C., and Mienie, E.L. (2018). Building a Civil-Military Framework for Cyber Deterrence. In Civil-Military Cooperation and International Collaboration in Cyber Operations, pp. 1-20. University of North Georgia Press. ISBN 978-1940771519
Payne B.R., Abegaz T.T. (2017). Securing the Internet of Things: Best Practices for Deploying IoT Devices. In El-Sheikh, Ertual, Francia, and Hernandez (Eds.) Computer and Network Security Essentials, pp. 493-506. Springer, Cham, Switzerland. ISBN 978-3319584232
Yang, J., Chen, T., Payne, B., Guo, P., Zhang, Y. (2020). Generating Routes for Autonomous Driving in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communications. Digital Communications and Networks, (June 2020). Elsevier. ISSN 2352-8648.
Górriz, J.M., Payne, B.R., et al. (2020) Artificial intelligence within the interplay between natural and artificial computation: Advances in data science, trends and applications, Neurocomputing, vol. 410, 2020, pp. 237-270, ISSN 0925-2312,
Moon, T., Abegaz, T.T., Payne, B.R., Salimi, A. (2020). MalAware Defensive: A Game to Train Users to Combat Malware. Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice, 2020 (1), article 2.
Sanfilippo J., Abegaz T., Payne B., Salimi A. (2019) STRIDE-Based Threat Modeling for MySQL Databases. In: Arai K., Bhatia R., Kapoor S. (eds) Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2019. FTC 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 1070, pp. 368-378. Springer, Cham
Comiskey, S., Payne, B.R., and Parker, V.C. (2019). Legal Considerations of Cryptocurrency in Divorce, Money Laundering, and Tax Evasion, Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines, 6 (3), 255-272. ISSN 2334-0169
Mienie, E.L., Payne, B.R. (2019). The Impact of Cyber-Physical Warfare on Global Human Security. International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism (IJCWT) 9 (3). pp. 36-50. ISSN: 1947-3435.
Payne, B.R. (2019). Car Hacking: Accessing and exploiting the CAN bus protocol. Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice, 2019 (1), article 5, 25 pp. ISSN: 2472-2707.
Payne, B.R. (2018). The expanding role of cyber in national security, Line of Defence, 1 (8), Winter 2018, DefSec Media, Auckland, New Zealand. (ISSN 2463-5774).
Abegaz, T.T., Payne, B.R. (2018). Securing the Cyber Pipeline: Toward National Strategies for Cyber Workforce Development, Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines, 5 (1), 39-57. ISSN 2334-0169
Payne, B.R., Abegaz, T.T. (2018). GenCyberScrum: Improving Cybersecurity Education Outcomes with the Scrum Framework, Journal of Computing Science in Colleges (JCSC), 33 (4), 60-68. ISSN 1937-4771
Payne, B.R., Mazuran, L.I., and Abegaz, T.T. (2018). Voice Hacking: Using Smartphones to Spread Ransomware to Traditional PCs. Journal of Cybersecurity Education Research and Practice, 2018 (1), Article 2. (ISSN: 2472-2707).
Yang, J., Shen, J., Guo, P., Payne, B., Wei, T. (2017). A Machine Learning Based Forwarding Algorithm over Cognitive Radios in Wireless Mesh Networks. In Xin-Lin Huang (Ed.), Machine Learning and Intelligent Communications (vol. 183, pp. 228-234). Springer International Publishing.