Eric Yocam

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 bridges deep technical cyber expertise with business strategy and leadership, equipping Eric to address cybersecurity not only as a technical discipline but as an organizational and strategic imperative. Eric concurrently serves as a Lecturer at California Polytechnic State University teaching undergraduate students cybersecurity, and as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Dominican University of California teaching an online course he developed — Information Security Risk Management — as part of their MS in Cybersecurity program. 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.