Our Leadership Team

Chris founded Hackademic Solutions to close a specific gap: mid-market CTOs and CISOs running Microsoft infrastructure who are accountable for AI governance but cannot find an advisory partner that fits their size, speed, or stack. The 10-day AI Posture Review is the answer he wanted as a practitioner and could not buy as a buyer.

His career sits at the intersection of academic research and high-stakes operations. As a Navy Lieutenant Commander and TOPGUN Instructor, he spent more than two decades operating under pressure where governance gaps have consequences measured in minutes. As a PhD researcher and program director affiliated with an NSA-designated Center of Academic Excellence, he has spent the same years studying why technology governance programs fail — and what makes the ones that work different.

Hackademic's methodology reflects both halves of that record: every engagement is anchored in published frameworks (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, AIUC-1, OWASP LLM Top 10, MITRE ATLAS) and hardened against operational reality. No frameworks-as-theater. No vendor marketing dressed up as methodology.

As Chief Research Officer, James anchors Hackademic's work in peer-reviewed research and two decades of building cybersecurity programs from the ground up. As Department Chair of Cybersecurity and Technology at National University and a contributor to the San Diego Cyber Clinic, he has spent his career turning emerging security research into curricula, clinics, and trained practitioners.

His research record is unusually broad for the field. As Principal Investigator and lead researcher, he has won and led grants from NASA, the Department of Defense, IBM's Watson AI University Partner Group, Hewlett Packard, Qualcomm, and Google.org — work spanning enterprise AI governance, Explainable AI (XAI) and human-led systems, Non-Human Identity (NHI) architecture, and zero-trust. That breadth lets him connect frontier AI governance questions to the identity, access, and architecture problems they actually rest on.

He brings the same rigor to client engagements. James designs Hackademic's research methodology around explainability and human judgment — the principle that the people accountable for an AI system must be able to understand and defend it. His background in interactive simulation and game-based learning also shapes how findings are delivered: not as a static report, but in a form decision-makers can absorb and act on.