A conversation with Cyber Security adjunct professor Jamie Wheeler may start with the extensive Lego collection in his home office. “It is a company that has consistently produced a high level of quality, their pricing has remained at a similar level, even when they started doing cross branding, and on top of that, they don't really have any real market competition. You can give somebody a Lego set, no matter what it is, and they're like, ‘Oh, great. I'm happy.’”
Understanding this basic concept of providing a quality product that customers want is perhaps one reason that Wheeler is so popular with students. Since 2018, when the George Mason alum got a call from CYSE chair Paulo Costa to teach classes and manage the master’s capstone course, Wheeler has a clear idea of what he wants his students to take away.
“When we designed the CYSE MS program, our key priority was to graduate highly technical students that were ready to exceed expectations on day one of their job,” said Costa. “The capstone focus was a major part of that vision and was not meant to teach new cyber tools, but to prepare our students for the paradigm shift when working in industry or government. With his wide professional portfolio and passion for leadership challenges, Jamie proved to be the perfect choice for leading such a unique course. Seeing the students’ feedback each semester after taking the capstone always makes me wish to be a grad student again so I could take it myself!”
Wheeler said, “One of the reasons I teach is because I had great bosses and great professors. What I didn't have was a great professor that acted like a boss. I want to give students an understanding that they're going face that gap from academia to the professional world, and it can be pretty large. It’s like a shock.”
Wheeler was deeply embedded in that professional world in consulting and engineering, but he wanted to move into the broader world of data, saying that he saw a transformation happening in his industry. This led to him getting his masters degree from George Mason.
When it comes to the capstone, Wheeler says he wants to challenge them “to go from being reactive thinkers that look at a syllabus and are looking to achieve some set of goals defined by others, to getting them to be proactive in thought, defining their own goals, managing their effort forward, and learning how to accept feedback for improvement as opposed to grades as a metric.”
Wheeler’s career is expansive. Recently he joined C3 AI as Director of Solution Architecture. He previously worked at Booze Allen Hamilton, leading transformative AI in the Department of Defense; he led the creation, strategy, and implementation for the Chief Data Office for the Defense Logistics Agency for Booz Allen; and was one of the early participants in creating the Chief Data Office for the Secretary of Defense.
Working for Capgemini, his primary client was a major consumer package retail goods companies, where in 2021, working in 26 languages in 11 markets, he oversaw the delivery of generative AI systems before people were calling it generative AI. “We were still trying to figure out what to commonly call it – foundational models? Natural language generation? But, if you bought food online or anything that cleans anything online, you have encountered our product”.
As much as he loves his work in the private sector, the call of a university setting is also strong. “There is something special about academia—and campus in particular—where there is an optimism that you can change the world and that you can change your life. It just doesn't exist anywhere else.”