Research portfolio

Projects, papers, startups, and OS code.

A working index of applied cybersecurity research, educational programs, software, and scholarship.

01

Projects

MATRIX is my current flagship. The remaining portfolio spans workforce development, human-centered security, systems assurance, and computing education.

Active

NebraskaCYBER MATRIX

A Security Operations Center, residency-style Intern Academy, and intelligent cyber range for Nebraska.

Status
Active
Role
Founder, PI & Program Director

Active

Scaling Up Best Practices in Computing Education

Using evidence and coordinated faculty work to broaden participation and improve student retention at UNO.

Co-PI

  • Student-success dashboard
  • Intro-course retention work
  • College-wide faculty coordination

Active

Scholarship for Service

Supporting cybersecurity students who commit their expertise to public service.

Co-PI & student adviser

  • Graduates placed in public service
  • Multi-year scholarship pathway
  • Student advising since 2014

Federal program paused

Nebraska GenCyber

Open, hands-on cybersecurity learning for students and educators.

PI

  • 3,000+ students reached
  • Open K–12 curriculum adopted in 13+ states
  • 55,000+ content views

Completed

CISA Risk Management Curriculum

Two systems-engineering-aligned courses for technical and managerial cybersecurity professionals.

PI on UNO subcontract

  • Two courses delivered
  • Technical and managerial tracks
  • NIST-aligned curriculum

Research complete · citizen-science project available

Cybertrust & PhishFinders

Understanding deception to design better defenses.

PI

  • 5,400+ trust decisions studied
  • 80-person empirical study
  • Public citizen-science dataset

Completed research

REaCH

Real-time emergency communication for hazardous-material incidents.

Co-PI

  • HazMat stakeholder requirements
  • IoT monitoring concepts
  • Emergency-alerting research

Completed · details restricted

DevOps for NC3

Translating open-source and software-engineering practice into the nuclear certification space.

PI on UNO subcontract

  • NC3 certification translation
  • Open-source lessons applied
  • Protected national-security work

Completed research

Patching Life-Critical Systems

Studying how hospitals can safely update high-value clinical systems without disrupting care.

Co-PI

  • Hospital patching research
  • Clinical-security collaboration
  • National protection focus

Research complete · open-source platform available

SecuWear

Making multi-component wearable security visible and testable.

PI

  • Open multi-component testbed
  • Repeatable IoT security testing
  • Five integrated technologies

Completed

INSuRE

Building authentic cybersecurity research experiences into capstone-like courses.

PI on UNO subcontract

  • Capstone research experiences
  • Student–researcher connection
  • NSA-sponsored collaboration
02

Active startups

Research and technical expertise translated into an oncology intelligence company and its first clinical-development product.

Full startup overview →

ActiveCompany

Existential Intelligence

Multimodal AI for oncology and clinical development.

A scientific and product company connecting radiological imaging, digital pathology, biomarkers, machine learning, and clinical outcomes to uncover clinically meaningful cancer signals.

My role / Co-founder · enterprise software architect · cybersecurity lead

  • Secure, scalable software architecture
  • Technical product development
  • Data-protection and cybersecurity strategy
Visit Existential Intelligence ↗

ActiveProduct

PhaseVantage

Make hidden vascular-risk differences visible before they affect a trial.

A clinical-development decision-support product combining pancreatic CT review with AI-supported macrovascular invasion assessment for Phase 2 and Phase 3 cancer trial teams.

My role / Co-founder · product architecture and cybersecurity

  • Clinical-trial decision-support workflow
  • Secure imaging and analysis systems
  • Sponsor-ready product delivery
Visit PhaseVantage ↗
03

Public repositories

Selected software, course materials, and research infrastructure.

04

Research papers

The full publication list.

Harris, M. A., Hale, M. L., & Toh, C. A. Towards an integrative approach for designing for cybersecurity in systems engineering. Proceedings of the Design Society, 5, 3161–3170.

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Ahuja, V., Rosser, H., Grover, A., & Hale, M. What’s hot and what’s not: Mapping consensus in IS research with citizen science. Big XII+ MIS Research Symposium.

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Rosser, H., Mayor, M., Stemmler, A., Ahuja, V., Grover, A., & Hale, M. Phish Finders: Crowd-powered RE for anti-phishing training tools. IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops.

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Ahuja, V. K., Rosser, H. K., Grover, A., & Hale, M. Phish Finders: Improving cybersecurity training tools using citizen science. ICIS Proceedings.

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Medcalf, S., Hale, M. L., Achutan, C., Yoder, A. M., Fruhling, A., & Shearer, S. W. Requirements gathering through focus groups for a real-time emergency communication system for HAZMAT incidents (REACH). Journal of Public Health Issues and Practices, 5(2), 188.

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Lumbard, K., Wethor, G., Goggins, S., Buhman, A., Hale, M., & Germonprez, M. Welcome? Investigating the reception of new contributors to organizational-communal open source software projects. 26th Americas Conference on Information Systems.

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Wethor, G., & Hale, M. L. StudySandboxx: An encapsulation tool for scraping, sandboxing, and preparing web content for HCI studies without sacrificing interactivity. Journal of Open Research Software.

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Hale, M. L. Eyestream: An open WebSocket-based middleware for serializing and streaming eye tracker event data from Gazepoint GP3 HD research hardware. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(40), 1620.

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Hale, M. L., Thapa, I., & Ghersi, D. FunSet: An open-source software and web server for performing and displaying Gene Ontology enrichment analysis. BMC Bioinformatics.

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Hale, M. L., Lotfy, K., Gamble, R. F., Walter, C., & Lin, J. Developing a platform to evaluate the security of wearable devices. Digital Communications and Networks.

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Roth, G. A., Mahoney, W. R., & Hale, M. L. Critical infrastructure: You get what you pay for. Journal of Information Warfare.

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Shrestha, I., & Hale, M. L. Detecting dynamic security threats in multi-component IoT systems. 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

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Hefley, M., Wethor, G., & Hale, M. L. Multimodal data fusion and behavioral analysis tooling for exploring trust, trust-propensity, and phishing victimization in online environments. 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

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Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. Semantic hierarchies for extracting, modeling, and connecting compliance requirements from regulatory information security control standards. Requirements Engineering, 1–38.

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Hale, M. L., Walter, C., Lin, J., & Gamble, R. F. A priori prediction of phishing victimization based on structural content factors. International Journal of Services Computing, 5(1), 1–13.

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Lotfy, K., & Hale, M. L. SecuWear: Assessing pairing and data exchange mechanism security in the wearable Internet of Things. 5th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Services.

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Marshall, A., Gamble, R. F., & Hale, M. L. Outcomes of emotional content from agile team forum posts. ACM International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering at ICSE.

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Walter, C., Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. Imposing security awareness on wearables. ACM International Workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems at ICSE.

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Hale, M. L., Ellis, D., Gamble, R., Walter, C., & Lin, J. SecuWear: An open source, multi-component hardware/software platform for exploring wearable security. 4th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Services.

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Hale, M. L., Gamble, R., Hale, J., Haney, M., Walter, C., & Lin, J. Measuring the potential for victimization in malicious content. 22nd IEEE International Conference on Web Services.

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Hale, M. L., & Hanson, S. A testbed and process for analyzing attack vectors and vulnerabilities in hybrid mobile apps connected to RESTful web services. 11th IEEE World Congress on Services Visionary Track on Security and Privacy.

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Hale, M. L., Gamble, R., & Gamble, P. CyberPhishing: A game-based platform for phishing awareness testing. 48th IEEE Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

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Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. Structuring mobile cloud SLAs for matching security controls based on a compliance vocabulary. In Smartphone Security and Secure Mobile Cloud Computing. Springer.

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Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. Toward increasing awareness of suspicious content through game play. 10th IEEE World Congress on Services.

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Gamble, R., & Hale, M. L. Assessing individual performance in agile undergraduate software engineering teams. 42nd IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference.

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Hale, M. L., Gamble, M. T., & Gamble, R. F. A design and verification framework for service composition in the cloud. 9th IEEE World Congress on Services, 317–324.

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Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. F. Building a compliance vocabulary to embed security controls in cloud SLAs. 9th IEEE World Congress on Services, 118–125.

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Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. F. Risk propagation of security SLAs in the cloud. IEEE GLOBECOM Workshop on Management and Security Technologies for Cloud Computing.

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Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. F. SecAgreement: Advancing security risk calculations in cloud services. 8th IEEE World Congress on Services, 133–140.

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Hale, M. L., Gamble, R. F., Wilson, K., & Narayan, A. Collaborative learning in software engineering teams. 17th Americas Conference on Information Systems.

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Gamble, M. T., Gamble, R. F., & Hale, M. L. Security policy foundations in context UNITY. 7th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems, 8–14.

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Hale, M. L., Jorgenson, N., & Gamble, R. F. Analyzing the role of tags as lightweight traceability links. 6th International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering at ICSE, 71–74.

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Jorgenson, N., Hale, M. L., & Gamble, R. F. SEREBRO: Facilitating student project team collaboration. 33rd ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, 1019–1021.

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Hale, M. L., Jorgenson, N., & Gamble, R. F. Predicting individual performance in student project teams. 24th IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training, 11–20.

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Complete publication record on Google Scholar ↗