Rate My Professor Pierson Clair

Pierson Clair serves as Associate Professor of Technology and Applied Computing Practice within the Engineering faculty at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. He holds a Master’s Degree in Digital Forensic Science from Champlain College and a Bachelor’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in International Security & Technology from USC, where he authored a 2008 senior thesis titled "Creating Policy to Mitigate Cyber Terror Attack Vectors Against Critical US Infrastructure." Since 2012, as adjunct faculty, Clair created the USC Interdisciplinary degree in International Security & Technology, the precursor to the Intelligence and Cyber Operations degree, and developed and taught pivotal courses including the Cyber Security and Digital Investigations capstone, Defending and Investigating Compromised Networks (TAC 458), Apple macOS/iOS computer forensics (TAC 445), Mobile Device digital forensics (TAC 447), TAC 125 From Hackers to CEO’s: An Introduction to Information Security, and TAC 375 Windows Digital Forensics and Cybersecurity Investigations. He joined full-time in Fall 2023 and serves as Assistant Director, Faculty Affairs of the Technology and Applied Computing Program.

Pierson Clair is an experienced incident response leader, certified digital forensic examiner, technical security consultant, and cyber security educator, with research interests in digital forensics acquisition challenges for Apple desktops, laptops, servers, and mobile devices, as well as incident response for ejecting long-term embedded threat actors. As Managing Director at Kroll, he led incident response, cyber remediation and recovery, and managed cyber security services. He has worked with federal, state, and local law enforcement and federal intelligence agencies, provided expert witness services in data security incidents, cyber security reasonableness, and EDR, MDR, MSP, MSSP matters, and assisted private sector clients from major corporations to small businesses in mitigating risks to operations.