2024 Million Dollar Club Inductees

Dr. Joshua Alcorn, PhD, an Assistant Research Professor at UCCS, researches: (1) Inspiring Future Cyber Defenders: Dr. Alcorn is leading the charge in pre-collegiate cybersecurity education. Through grant-funded initiatives, he's equipping young learners and K-12 educators with the essential skills and knowledge to safeguard our digital future; (2) Fortifying Our Digital Infrastructure: His innovative research in network confidence assessment and data path analysis is revolutionizing the way we secure software-defined networks. By identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities, Dr. Alcorn is strengthening our digital defenses; and (3) Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice: Dr. Alcorn's commitment to practical application ensures that his work directly impacts real-world challenges. He is fostering future generations of civilian and military cybersecurity professionals to address critical national security challenges.

Gretchen Bliss joined the UCCS team in March 2020 and collaboratively built the UCCS Cybersecurity POWER Strategy and obtained renewed cybersecurity funding from the legislature twice in addition to collaborating with EAS, CoB, CPS and LAS on many grants to raise the bar for cybersecurity partnerships, outreach, workforce development, education and research focusing on excellence, diversity and interdisciplinarity.  The Cybersecurity Programs Office has conducted over 300 cybersecurity outreach events reaching 13,000 students, faculty, industry, government and community members over the past 6 years, the cybersecurity population has grown 37% and we now have cybersecurity pathways in 5 of 6 colleges.

Season Doebler is the Director of the Family Development Center at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Her funding has helped with programing and maintaining the FDC and providing quality curriculum and care for the children that attend. 

Dr. Lisa Hollis-Brown, PhD, is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Lisa’s recent collaborative funding focuses on creating course-base undergraduate research experiences in gene editing for all students.  

Dr. Christi Kasa, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning and the Director of the Office of Inclusive Services (OIS) at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.  She started the OIS after working to pass legislation to allow young adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) to obtain inclusive post-secondary education at colleges and universities in Colorado. At UCCS, the OIS currently supports 23 students with ID to be fully included in 4 years of university classes and developmental experiences historically reserved for non-disabled students. With peer mentor support, OIS students engage in neurotypical academic classes, integrated social events both on and off campus, independent living on campus, and employment training and experience on and off campus. Dr. Kasa uses the money she raises and earns in grants and scholarships to fund the work of the OIS and to partner with UCCS to build and nurture inclusion throughout campus.

Dr. Andrew Lac, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Psychology in the psychology department.  He is the author of 100 scholarly publications: 86 peer-reviewed journal articles, 12 book/encyclopedia chapters, and 2 editions of a research methods textbook. Dr. Lac's research specialties are in psychometrics and addictive behaviors. In psychometrics, his research focuses on developing and validating new multi-factor measurement scales using factor-analytic techniques, scrutinizing the measurement reliabilities and validities of preexisting scales and classification systems, and writing methodological book chapters. In addictive behaviors, his research focuses on the psychology of alcohol use, marijuana use, almost any psychoactive substance that can be ingested or inhaled, sexual behaviors, interpersonal compulsions, and other addictive activities. Dr. Lac teaches graduate-level courses in research methods and statistics. 

Dr. Michele L. Okun, PhD, is an Professor of Research at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Director of the Sleep and Biobehavioral Health Research Laboratory. As one of the leading researchers on sleep during the perinatal period, her work investigates how sleep disturbances, particularly insomnia, augment risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes via neuro-immune and neuro-endocrine pathways. Dr. Okun’s work has shown that poor sleep quality and insomnia significantly increase the risk for postpartum depression. Currently, she is examining how insomnia increases the risk of postpartum depression and the biological mediators of this relationship. She is also evaluating the degree to which a smart bassinet improves infant and maternal sleep thereby mitigating PPD/PPA risk. In addition to studying perinatal women, Dr. Okun is evaluating how cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia influences cardiometabolic indices in post-menopausal women.  Dr. Okun is funded by NIH and DoD, has served as a peer reviewer for over two dozen journals, and has authored or co-authored over six dozen scientific articles and book chapters.  

Dr. Oluwatosin Oluwadare is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Innovation at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS), with a secondary appointment in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Anschutz Medical Campus. His research interests include deep learning, computational biology, bioinformatics, computational genomics, design of algorithms, and data science. He is the recipient of the UCCS College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Outstanding Pre-Tenure Researcher of the Year Award (2023-2024), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) ( 2024), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) recipient (2023), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Early-Career Award (2022). His research program has been supported by NIH, NSF, and Griffiss Institute.

Dr. Keith Paarporn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, joining in 2022. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2018. Before joining UCCS, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He recently was awarded an ERI NSF award and also serves as a co-PI on the VICEROY Fellowship program, funded by Griffiss Institute and the Colorado-Washington Security Scholars Program (CWSSP). His research studies networked multi-agent systems from the lens of game theory, control theory, and optimization. A central goal is to understand how agents - whether they are automated devices, humans, or organizations - make decisions when interacting with other decision-makers. Application areas of this research include cybersecurity, social dynamics, and the spread of infectious diseases. 

Dr. Anatoliy Pinchuk is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Energy Sciences at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics and Chemistry from the Institute of Surface Chemistry, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, following his B.S. and M.S. in Physics from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. His postdoctoral training included appointments as a Humboldt Research Fellow at RWTH Aachen, Germany, and at Northwestern University. Since joining UCCS in 2008, he has advanced from Assistant Professor to full Professor in 2018.  Professor Pinchuk's research excellence has been recognized through numerous awards, including the 2018 Faculty Award for Excellence in Research and the 2012 New Inventor of the Year. His innovations have resulted in four U.S. patents in biochemical sensing and pathogen detection. With over 120 peer-reviewed publications, his work advances the fundamental understanding of plasmonic excitations in nanostructures and their applications.

Dr. Daniel L. Segal, PhD, is the Kraemer Family Professor of Aging Studies and Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). He joined the faculty at UCCS in 1995 after graduating from the University of Miami. His program of research focuses on the assessment of psychopathology among older adults, the expression and measurement of anxiety in later-life, suicide risk and resilience and aging, and the impact of personality disorders across the lifespan. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and of the American Psychological Association (Division 12 and Division 20). He has published over 200 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters and 5 professional books.

Dr. Emily Skop's  scholarship untangles a world where withholding compassion, ordaining restriction, and furthering dehumanization are increasingly normalized. To counter this, she weaves together definitions of refuge and care to reorient  institutions towards justice and to recognize how  institutions are made of both systems and structures, as well as hearts and minds. Through co-creation and an ethos of care pledge, she works  with collaborators in both refugee resettlement and higher education. She has built a significant research record, including a book and nearly sixty peer-reviewed book chapters and research articles, along with dozens of invited lectures and presentations and several institutional and national awards. In her most recent collaborative work sponsored by the National Science Foundation, she contends that we must actively work with multiple ways of knowing and seek new ideas from scholars, research enterprise professionals, and research leaders. The “ethos of care” brings these triads together to imagine and reimagine what a transformed academy could be if we really started paying attention to those who are missing, silenced, or harmed. Together, through this commitment, Dr. Skop believes we can improve the faculty landscape of today and for the next generation of scholars.

Dr. Thomas Wolkow, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biology at UCCS with research experience in different areas of mycology. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Lafayette College (Easton, PA) where he worked in the lab of Dr. Shyamal Majumdar using electron microscopy to catalog the fungal diversity of local rivers and streams. In graduate school at Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN), he joined Dr. John Hamer's lab to study the molecular mechanisms of cellular development using the filamentous fungus, Aspergillus nidulans. After finishing his PhD in 1998, he joined Dr. Tamar Enoch's lab at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA) to study genomic stability pathways using the fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Dr. Wolkow is currently using fission yeast to study how eukaryotic cells detect and respond to different environmental stresses.

Dr. Yanyan Zhuang, PhD, is a systems researcher with expertise in privacy and security, computer networking, and software engineering. Her prior work includes the development of a diagnosis tool for networking applications, and conducting human-subject experiments to understand how software developers make mistakes, which has led to an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. This put UCCS at No. 53 nation wide for Software Engineering in 2018. As a Canadian, she also won the prestigious Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellowship for her work in protecting mobile and IoT devices. She is an active proponent of young women researchers. She has mentored and is mentoring dozens of female students (including African American, East, and South Asian female students), several graduate students from Africa, Latino students, and high school students.

Dr. Leilani Feliciano is a licensed psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology. She is a clinical psychologist by training with specialties in both geropsychology and behavioral medicine. In addition to teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in psychology, she also supervises students in their clinical practicum through the UCCS Aging Center. Since joining the faculty in 2007, Dr. Feliciano has maintained an active research program in mental health and aging. She is primarily interested in the intersection between mental and physical health and utilizing behavioral interventions to support improvements in health and well-being across adulthood. Specific areas of interest include late-life depression, sleep disturbances, managing co-morbid psychological and medical problems, and behavioral problems associated with dementia. Dr. Feliciano also maintains multiple service roles including serving as the Director of Clinical Training and as a board member for the Council of University Directors in Clinical Psychology.