Rate My Professor Lei Chen

Dr. Lei Chen is a Tenured Full Professor and the Graduate Program Director for the Department of Information Technology at Georgia Southern University. He received his B.Eng. in Computer Science and Applications from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China, in 2000, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Auburn University, USA, in 2007. During his doctoral studies, he served as a Graduate Research Assistant for five years and as a Vodafone Research Fellow. Before joining Georgia Southern University in 2015, Dr. Chen was an Assistant Professor and later a Tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Sam Houston State University for eight years. There, he also functioned as the Graduate Program Coordinator for three master's programs with approximately 100 students and four graduate certificate programs.

Dr. Chen's research specializations include security, privacy, and digital forensics in networks, information systems, cloud computing, Big Data, and mobile, handheld, and wireless networks, extending to computer networking, multimedia networking, network routing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining. He has authored or co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed scholarly works, such as journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Key publications include the edited book "Wireless Network Security: Theories and Practices," published by Springer (U.S.) and Higher Education Press in August 2013, which has received over 15,900 combined downloads, and the co-edited book "Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics in the Cloud," published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2019. Recent works encompass "Probabilistic modeling of decryption-failure bounds in CRYSTALS-Kyber under the post-quantum threat model" (2026), "AI-Powered IT Project Management: Analyzing the Effectiveness of Advanced Project Management Tools to Ensure Project Efficiency" (2025), and "Automated Data Extraction Framework for Customizable Safety and Security Analysis of U.S. University Campuses" (2025). Dr. Chen has secured more than $3 million in funding from U.S. federal agencies, including the National Security Agency and National Science Foundation, and serves as Co-Principal Investigator on the NSF-funded project "Enabling Lifelong Success in the Information Technology Workforce" (2023–2029). His contributions as a Vodafone Research Fellow highlight his impact in the field.