Bio

Dr. Bryson Payne is the founding Director of the Center for Cyber Operations Education at the University of North Georgia, an NSA Center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense. He is also a tenured professor of computer science at UNG, where he has taught aspiring coders and cyber professionals since 1998. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP®) and Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and holds the elite SANS|GIAC GPEN (penetration testing) and GREM (reverse engineering) certifications, among other industry certifications. He was also the first Department Head of Computer Science at UNG and enjoys working with K-12 schools worldwide to promote computer science education. He is also a TEDx speaker on coding and cybersecurity. Featured in CIO magazine, Campus Technology, and the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Payne is the best-selling author of Teach Your Kids to Code: A Parent-Friendly Guide to Python Programming (2015, No Starch Press), now published in six languages (Russian, Chinese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, and English), and Learn Java the Easy Way (2017, No Starch Press). He’s a popular online instructor with over 40,000 students from more than 160 countries, including his top-rated Udemy course, Real-World Ethical Hacking (2017). Dr. Payne has received more than $40.5 million in grant funding to support innovative computer science and cybersecurity programs and research. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia State University and has published articles in scholarly and trade journals, in addition to speaking regularly at national and international conferences on computer science and cybersecurity education.