Mississippi State University (MSU), a 2001 NSA Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAE/IAE) is administering a four-year Federal Cyber Service Scholarship for Service (SFS) program in collaboration with Jackson State University, a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) located within the State of Mississippi. MSU will also work with Tuskegee University to advance Tuskegee's IA program. The program is housed within the MSU College of Engineering by the Computer Science Department. The Department of Computer Science has a robust interdisciplinary information assurance research program, involving faculty from the areas of software engineering, artificial intelligence, and high performance computing (see www.cs.msstate.edu/~security).
Intellectual merit. The MSU SFS program offers a multiyear build-up of the SFS scholarship program designed to increase the number of graduates entering the federal information assurance (IA) workforce, while at the same time extending the IA course offerings outside the current Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering student base to other departments and students across campus in the business school and social science disciplines. This expansion matches the evolution of the IA field and trains better prepared IA professionals.
Broader impact. The collaboration between MSU and JSU is enhancing the IA curriculum at JSU by making additional courses and IA faculty available to JSU students, and by providing an opportunity for JSU students to become SFS scholars. The collaboration is helping to increase the diversity of the federal IA workforce.