Lt Col Paul M. Beach, Deputy Director, Department of Cyberspace Studies
Lt Col Paul M. Beach is currently Deputy Director, Department of Cyberspace Studies within the School of Strategic Force Studies. Prior to this assignment, Lt Col Beach served as an assistant professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Management at the Air Force Institute of Technology. He researches data storage and retrieval systems, systems security engineering, resiliency, and cyber security. Additionally, he teaches courses in agile software engineering.
Lt Col Beach was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He received his commission through the Reserve Officer Training Corps in 2006. During his career, he has worked at squadron, agency and JTF levels managing and operating classified and unclassified deployable and in-garrison base networks, ballistic missile defense long-haul communications networks and the Air Force enterprise network. Additionally, he has taught advanced cyberspace topics as a formal training instructor.
Lt Col Beach attended AFIT as an in-residence Doctor of Philosophy student pursuing a Systems Engineering degree. During this time, he conducted research analyzing engineering design principles for the development of secure and resilient systems and developed a methodology for identifying suitable underlying data models based on observations of relational database usage on non-distributed systems.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 2006
Master of Science in Leadership & Information Technology, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, 2009
Doctor of Philosophy in Systems Engineering, Air Force Instutute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, 2020