Casey W. O’Brien
Assistant Executive Director & Co-Principal Investigator, Dissemination
Casey W. O’Brien was a Co-Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the National CyberWatch Center from 2005-2012. From 2012-2021, Casey was the Executive Director and Principal Investigator. He is currently the Assistant Director for Cyber Defense Education and Training with the Information Trust Institute in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Casey has more than 25 years of large-scale information security and IT engineering, implementation, and management experience in challenging and cutting-edge public and private sector environments.
Casey’s teaching and research interests include: practice-centered education and training solutions that combine accelerated learning programs, validated assessments, instruction, practice labs, and challenge scenarios to improve information security talent management in organizations; rapid deployment of customizable and adaptive curriculum that raises learner capability maturity in foundational security concepts, tactics, techniques, and procedures; and formative credentialing solutions that increase the number of capable professionals.
Casey is the Technical Editor of five textbooks: Ethical Hacking & Systems Defense, Linux Server Fundamentals, Information Security Fundamentals, Introduction to Scripting, and Networking Fundamentals.
Casey earned a B.A. in Psychology from the University of St. Thomas and an M.A. in Psychology from Duquesne University.
