Eric Yocam holds a Ph.D. in Cyber Operations from Dakota State University's Beacom College of Computer and Cyber Sciences. Dakota State University is one of only nine universities in the nation to hold all three National Security Agency National Centers of Academic Excellence designations — Cyber Defense (CAE-CD), Cyber Operations (CAE-CO), and Cyber Research (CAE-R). Eric also holds a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) — a combination that
Background
Ethnicity:
I'm a quarter Irish, quarter Welsh, quarter German, and quarter French
His research spans adversarial machine learning, post-quantum cryptography, agricultural IoT security, LLM hallucination mitigation, autonomous vehicle lane detection, and space IoT cybersecurity risk. He is an IEEE Senior Member whose industry innovations span DeepFake Detection, Behavioral Biometrics, and Temporal Identity Vaulting.
Across his portfolio, a unifying question emerges: how do you secure systems that lack strong central authority? His technical work — hardening AI models, securing distributed networks, defending autonomous systems — addresses this from an engineering perspective. A second, less conventional layer of his research examines it through governance: his work on celebrity board directors and decentralized cryptocurrency markets argues that technical security is necessary but not sufficient — who controls a system, and under what incentives, matters just as much as the code. Taken together, his research is interdisciplinary and emerging-topic focused, tracking where risk is growing fastest across AI ecosystems, distributed networks, and markets where institutional oversight is thin.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering, University Pacific, Stockton, California, 1990. Master of Business Administration, University San Diego, 1997. Master of Science in Finance, Seattle University, 2002.
Master of Science in Computer Science, California State University, Chico, 2004.
Career
Member of technical staff Apple Computer/Claris Corporation, Santa Clara, California, 1991—1993, Media Vision Corporation, Fremont, 1993—1994. Technical manager Ray Dream Corporation, Mountain View, 1994—1996, Hewlett-Packard Company, Cupertino, 1997—1997. Data center project manager Intuit Corporation, San Diego, 1998—1999.
Senior program manager Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington, since 1999.
Achievements
Eric Wayne Yocam has been listed as a noteworthy engineer by Marquis Who's Who.
