The GNSI Advantage

Faculty Advisors

 

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Agrawal teaches courses in information assurance, business data communications and applications development. A professor in and former chair of the School of Information Systems and Management, Agrawal has been the recipient of USF's university-wide award recognizing teaching excellence.

An expert in the areas of cyber security, social media analytics, software quality, offshoring and outsourcing, his research interests include extreme event response, social media analytics, decision fusion and software quality. He is an avid researcher and his work has been published in numerous academic journals, including Management Science, MIS Quarterly, the INFORMS Journal on Computing, the Journal of Management Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Decision Support Systems and the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce. His research and teaching have been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum and Sun Microsystems. Prior to joining academia, Agrawal was a member of the Indian Police Service.

Agrawal earned a PhD in information systems at SUNY Buffalo and studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.

Full bio here.

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Alexopolous teaches a variety of courses on topics related to contemporary Russian politics and society, modern Europe and the Soviet Union. Her undergraduate and graduate courses tend to focus on conflict in the world, comparative dictatorship and authoritarianism, the problems of war and revolution, as well as genocide and human rights. 

In her research, Alexopolous examines the threads that connect twentieth-century Soviet and twenty-first-century Russian authoritarianism, especially in the dis/information space.

My most recent book, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. The work examines the system of violent human exploitation in the Stalinist forced labor camps, 1929-1953.

Full bio here.

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Barr is an Associate Professor at the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida.  She holds undergraduate degrees in Classical Studies and English Literature and PhD in Plant, Insect, and Microbial Science. Dr. Barr joined the faculty at the University of South Florida College of Public Health in 2021. Her research program studies viruses in order to develop better control and interventions for preventing infections in humans and animals.  Her research is focused on epidemiology and pathogenesis of vector-borne and zoonotic viruses, specifically the flaviviruses and alphaviruses. Dr. Barr’s research focuses on defining the epidemiology of arboviruses in respect to movement of humans and animal. She is also deeply interested in viral pathogenesis and is utilizing human organoids and stem cells to understand the progression and establishment of viral infections in the brain.

Full bio here.

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From 2017-2019, Borum was also jointly appointed as a Senior Behavioral Scientist in the National Security Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).  Borum supported three Directors of National Intelligence (DNI) on the Intelligence Science Board (ISB) and served on the Defense Science Board Task Force on Understanding Human Dynamics, and served on the Steering Committee for the National Academy of Sciences’ Study on Sociocultural Data to Accomplish Department of Defense Missions.  He has taught courses on Terrorism, Intelligence Concepts, Intelligence Analysis, Information Behavior, Strategy & Decision-Making, Interrogation, and Criminal Psychology and is author/ co-author of more than 175 professional publications.

Full bio here.

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Farhadi is an Assistant Professor of Peace & Conflict and Faculty Director of the Executive Education Program at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on the intersection of geoeconomics, geopolitics, and religion & conflict, with a particular focus on the Great Power Competition in the "Silk Road" Central and South Asia (CASA) region. Dr. Farhadi also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Great Power Competition peer-reviewed book series and leads the Great Power Competition Initiative— a collaborative program between USF and the National Defense University Near East South Asia (NESA) Center for Strategic Studies, aimed at providing a broader understanding of the geopolitical challenges facing the United States in the 21st Century.

 

Formerly Dr. Farhadi served in senior positions for Afghanistan and extensively advised the United States government and various other international organizations. 

Full bio here.

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Goldstein has maintained a steadfast commitment to intervention research for 40 years. He's sought to develop and evaluate interventions to teach functional social, language, and literacy skills to individuals with a variety of disabilities. Goldstein has engaged in research across the life span, but his primary focus has been on early intervention and prevention, especially in the following areas:

• Embedding interventions focusing on language, vocabulary, and phonological awareness skills into shared book reading
• Effects of vocabulary and phonological awareness intervention on preventing reading disabilities in at-risk children in low income schools
• Observational learning and generalization processes in language learning
• Peer-mediated interventions to promote social communication in children with autism and other developmental disabilities in inclusive preschools

Full bio here.

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Sudeep Sarkar is a Distinguished University Professor, Chair of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and Co-Director of the USF Institute for Artificial Intelligence + X. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering on a University Presidential Fellowship from The Ohio State University, Columbus, and his B. Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. 

He has 35 years of experience conducting and directing fundamental research in computer vision, predictive learning, biometrics, and artificial intelligence. His use-inspired contributions are in systems to recognize persons from how they walk (gait biometrics), automated recognition of actions, activities, and events in a video, economic activity from satellite images, and extracting precise medically relevant information from medical images.  He has directed 22 Doctoral and 25 Master's students on these topics.

Full bio here.

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