About Dr. K

As a digital game design and development instructor in Lexington, KY, I am passionate about unraveling digital mysteries, advancing the field of information technology, community development and teaching students to be critical thinkers.  I am a digital forensics and cybersecurity expert with 16 years of experience as a webmaster and search engine optimization consultant, and over a decade of experience in technology leadership and instructional technology. I earned my PhD in IT, with a specialization in digital forensics, and a dissertation on password cryptography, protection motivation theory, and password entropy. ​I have developed skills investigating disc images, networks, browsers, USB devices, and wireless devices. 

As a school principal for 11 years, I handled over 10,000 discipline incidents, and I was taken aback by the number of cases involving computers, mobile devices, and smartphones with evidence of drugs, child pornography, weapons, abuse, bullying, cybercrime, and theft. I developed a passion to understand more about cybersecurity, digital evidence, and IT law, which led to my pursuit of a PhD in Information Technology with a specialization in digital forensics from 2019-2023. During this time, I gained extensive experience using digital forensics tools to investigate disc images, networks, browsers, USB devices, and wireless devices. My research and practice also included social engineering, obfuscation techniques, malware analysis, Wi-Fi sniffers, virtual machines, Kali Linux, Autopsy, OSForensics, Cellebrite, hashing, Windows/Mac operating systems, evidence collection, case reporting, cloud computing, data analysis, blockchain, AI, machine learning, IOT, risk management, and e-discovery.