BRADLEY D. TAYLOR
Present Position
Clinical Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, The Catholic University of America
Chapter Affiliation
U.S. Naval Academy
Background Information
CV
Biography
Statement
When I began teaching undergraduates in Control Systems Engineering at the United States Naval Academy and simultaneously began my graduate Studies in Computer Science at The George Washington University, I joined Sigma Xi. Not only did I enjoy the opportunity to learn my faculty colleagues’ research specialties during chapter meetings, but I also enjoyed the wealth of science and engineering portrayed by American Scientist. After my prior experience in submarines and industry, Sigma Xi made an immediate, substantial contribution towards my kid-in-the-candy-store sense of awe, learning about the broader universe and its fundamental laws around me.
In the ensuing couple decades since joining Sigma Xi, working in academia and governmental labs, I’ve continued to learn and share this wonder with others—students and colleagues, both close and remote. Expert knowledge is local, but the underlying patterns of knowledge, universal. At the conclusion of this fall semester, I became an academic parent as my first 2 doctoral candidates successfully defended their dissertations! Each presented different methods to identify and combat different types of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks: now they will teach their own cadre of students. These join the hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students who have shared the classroom and lab with me; we’ve learned from each other.
This is my thesis for service as your associate director: learn and represent! Sometimes that requires boots on the ground; sometimes it is a phone call, email or video chat; often it means listening more than broadcasting. I’ve listened to needs and proposed solutions from scientists and engineers in Indian Head, MD; technicians and engineers in Ft. Lauderdale, FL; a double-PhD chief engineer in Sofia, Bulgaria; and several educators at a couple of universities in Hong Kong last summer; we’ve shared some successful designs. The problems faced first in the field, or repeated problems, have been taught to students in the classroom or design patterns developed to lower future costs and make tomorrow’s discoveries build on yesterdays. I’ve listened to varied (often opposite) viewpoints from vendors, integrators, cyber security specialists, government labs such as NIST, on bi-weekly phone conferences—working with others to find common foundational solutions that already exist; or apply existing methods to discover the unknown: forming high performance technical teams bringing diverse perspectives is key!