Dakota State University

Sammy Drummond '21

Physical Science (BS)

Throughout his time at DSU, recent graduate Sammy Drummond definitely made an impact. He was a successful student-athlete, excelled in the classroom, and was a vital part of DSU’s expanding culture of undergraduate research.

“Sammy has been a delight to mentor,” said Dr. Michael Gaylor, Associate Research Professor of Chemistry. “His passion and drive for achieving the highest levels of research and scholarly productivity has been unprecedented in my research tenure at DSU.”

Gaylor was able to treat Drummond as he would an experienced graduate student during his 1-year stint in the Gaylor Lab conducting. The research focused on the origins of life chemistry in support of a large grant award to DSU from the National Science Foundation and South Dakota EPSCoR. Gaylor noted that Drummond “always generates interesting and provocative data sets that continually spawn ever more exciting and novel avenues of research inquiry for our team.”

Through his research with Gaylor, Drummond has been a recipient of multiple academic awards, multiple research grant awards, lead author on 15 conference papers, and two papers just accepted for publication in the high-impact international peer-reviewed journals Astrobiology and Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres. And he is the first author on a manuscript in the final stages of internal review for submission to the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, according to Gaylor. “Such sophisticated and impactful contributions to the scientific literature by an undergraduate student are truly remarkable (and rare),” he added.     

In addition to working with Gaylor, Drummond completed physics research with Dr. James Maloney, focusing on shielding (protection from radiation) on future NASA missions. NASA is considering different options for propulsion to Mars, and with different methods come different issues, he explained. “It relates to the new propulsion methods, and how we can protect the spaceship and also astronauts from those new issues,” Drummond said.

Maloney and Drummond utilized an automated process to run simulations based on different shielding parameters, allowing for quicker processing of data. They developed a program that picks out the best results from the simulations and then generates new parameters based on those results, Drummond shared.

This research experience has prepared him for the next step in his education.

“This has been very useful for me to understand how research actually works in the real world, in an academic setting, rather than just in a classroom lab,” he said. He is also appreciative of Dakota State’s small program size, which allowed him to develop really close relationships with his professors.

Drummond, a physical science major at DSU, was accepted to 11 graduate programs across the country, including Dartmouth. In August he will be moving on to earn his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of South Carolina. With his education there, he hopes to become a leading scientist in an emerging field and deal with the major problems of our time, like energy issues.

“The demand for energy is obviously increasing and we have to make decisions about how to improve our efficiency,” he said.

He hopes to help solve problems related to the energy field, so he can provide his future family with the ability to live a high-quality life.

Vinny Campbell '22

Computer Graphics (BS)

Dakota State University’s Animation program was what first drew Vinny Campbell to campus. A Tea, SD native, Campbell wanted an affordable option close to home and found that at DSU.

“Animation is a beautiful art form that I feel gets looked down upon as something for children,” he said, “however, animation can tell powerful and moving stories, just like any film or piece of media.”

Ultimately, Campbell decided against doing animation professionally, due to concerns about moving and job security. So he switched majors to Computer Graphics, which fits his love of art and graphic design, and kept animation as his minor.

During his time at DSU, he’s learned better time management. “That might sound like I was a procrastinator, but I was quite the opposite,” Campbell said. “I used to get work done really fast and work ahead in classes. That might sound like a good thing, but it was really stressful, and I only did it because I was scared of failing or falling behind. I eventually learned how to portion my work to make sure I have time for myself and to rest.”

Support from faculty has helped Campbell throughout his educational journey. “I really appreciate Dr. Stacey Berry,” he said. “I’m someone who is learning how to have a backbone and when I see something that doesn’t seem right, I can go to Stacey because I know she will help me figure out what to do.”

Campbell recommends getting involved on campus through clubs to find friends. He is a member of two clubs at DSU, The Alliance and DSU Live Productions. The Alliance is a gender and sexuality alliance that provides a safe and inclusive environment for people of all identities and raises awareness of the LGBTQ+ community. DSU Live Productions is a student-run event production service for DSU events.

“As a transgender student here at DSU, I was very interested in getting involved with the Alliance,” he said. “I wanted to find a place where I knew I was safe since that can be hard here in the Midwest. Then from there, I started looking at other groups.”

In addition to joining clubs, Campbell also draws comics for the Trojan Times. He enjoys the ability to draw, explore writing, and talk about important issues through comics. He also submits comics to his hometown newspaper, Tea Weekly.

As he looks to the future, he has an interest in entering advertising but is open to other career options. “Some other things I think about doing are going full-time into comic work, being a courtroom artist, being a paleoartist, and being a clown,” he shared.

Computer Graphics (BS)

Corben Leo '21

Computer Science (BS)

“How many people can say they hacked the Army without getting into trouble?”

Corben Leo can, and he’s done it twice.

The senior computer science major from Champlin, MN has won the annual Hack the Army event two years in a row.

“It’s definitely exciting and satisfying to find vulnerabilities [in the military’s digital assets],” Leo said because by finding these, there is less concern about “other countries trying to exploit those vulnerabilities and use them against the government.”

Hack the Army is part of a larger bug bounty program called Hack the Pentagon, designed to find security gaps in the nation’s cybersecurity defenses. The service partnered with the bug bounty platform HackerOne for the event.

For this year’s Hack the Army 3.0, there was a different scope, Leo said, a focus on 11 specific websites versus all the Army’s digital sites in Hack the Army 2.0. This made it a little harder because with fewer sites to look at they had to dig deeper into the applications.

His hacking and coding experience helped. Leo has been involved in finding security gaps – or vulnerabilities – for many years.

“I got into hacking as a high school freshman, then I got into bug bounties as a high school junior, so I’ve been doing this a while now,” he said. He’s continued participating in these events in college, has his own bug bounty company, Lynx Security LLC, and works part-time as a software engineer with Assetnote.

Classroom experience in The Beacom College of Computer and Cyber Sciences has been helpful as well.

“As a computer science major, I write a lot of code,” Leo said. This experience gives him a lot more insight into an app. “Having created something similar is definitely an advantage,” he shared. And although there are ethical considerations with hacking, “in my experience it’s pretty obvious what’s right and what’s wrong.”

He hadn’t realized this could be a career path, but bug bounties can make for a fun, non-traditional career, something “you can do legally and get paid for.”

There will always be a need for these types of cybersecurity professionals, he added, so he feels lucky to have gotten into the career field early, but advises it’s something “anyone can pick up if they want a challenge.”

Leo expects to graduate in December 2021, and plans to stay in South Dakota after graduation. “I like South Dakota.”

Computer Science (BS)

Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS)

Evan Bolt '19

Applied Computer Science (MS)

Evan Bolt grew up working on his family farm near Edgerton, Minn. He is now he is working on the world stage, contributing to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center at his job in Laurel, MD, with Johns Hopkins’ University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

The dashboard has been named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2020, and the Coronavirus Resource Center recently received the “Meeting the Moment for Public Health” award from Research! America. An oral history on the creation of the dashboard says “it became the data source relied upon globally for near-real-time tracking of the biggest health crisis this century.” As of March 2021, it had been accessed over 210 billion times.

The significance of this project really hit home for Bolt after hearing an address by President Biden, in which he stated he kept the number of those who have passed away from COVID in his pocket. That number is from the APL dashboard. News stories also attribute their data to Johns Hopkins.

“Seeing it in the news and hearing about it from others helps keeps it in perspective,” he said.

“I’m helping contribute to that, and that’s impactful,” Bolt said. “It’s great to see I can have an effect like that.”

“It’s nice to be able to say I’m helping in some small way,” he said.

When the pandemic began in January 2020, Johns Hopkins’ associate professor Lauren Gardner and a group of researchers in the Whiting School of Engineering created a COVID dashboard effort on January 22. After only five days they realized there was too much data to manage manually, and brought in APL on January 27, 2020. APL is experienced with data processing and analysis, and helped make the dashboard the “most trusted, accurate source of information available on the pandemic,” said the oral history.

By March, Bolt was pulled off his work on software development and reverse engineering to create “web scrapers” to pull in data.

These data were sometimes pulled from websites, sometimes from raw HTML code. Because APL was scraping data globally, the team members had to look at global sites and glean what they meant. “Google translate is a friend,” he said.

Looking at the big picture, “it’s really incredible, taking thousands of data points from the county level in the U.S. to countries and regions across the world, and collecting all these data points and distilling them into a manageable set for people to see,” Bolt said.

“Web scraping is just as much art as science,” he said, because every website is different, and there are lots of nuances. They have had to be aware of definitions and new terminology and be vigilant with the numbers collected.

“We’re just trying to make sure we are able to collect the most accurate data as recently as possible,” he said.

Bolt’s work has evolved over the year, and now includes a leadership role as a task lead for vaccination data. Since December 2020 he has been working to identify data points for vaccination and looking ahead as to where the data and terminology would change. “Reporting went from ‘Stage 1 and Stage 2 groups’ for Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, then to ‘partially and fully vaccinated’ after the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine was approved. It’s been involved,” he said.

So involved that he said this project has taken up his whole life. “It’s nice to be able to work from home, but it takes 24/7 attention,” he said. All this is taking place while he is earning his third degree from DSU, a Ph.D. in Cyber Operations, but the all-online programming makes it convenient.

His education gave him a broad base to deal with these situations. “The environment at DSU definitely helped prepare me for this sort of development,” Bolt said. Particularly from a programming aspect, “DSU definitely prepared me through course experience, project experience, or absorbing knowledge through conversations.”

While he was hired at APL to work on reverse engineering, the dashboard project has introduced him to the world of data science work, and the leadership opportunities of being a task lead. That flexibility is what he enjoys about working at APL.

“I love that every day is different. You can be excited for what you’ll be doing the next day.”

He also has high praise for his team at APL. “They are a group of very smart people, diligent and dedicated,” he said, and are very supportive with problem-solving. But beyond intelligence, “I just work with a group of very good human beings.”

He added, “They say ‘Teamwork makes the dream work,’ and that is really true.”

Cyber Operations (BS)

Applied Computer Science (MS)

Odin Bernstein '21

Cyber Operations (BS)

By the numbers, Odin Bernstein is a very busy student.

• He is working on the 4+1 program to receive two degrees (his bachelor’s degree in Cyber Operations in May 2021, and his master’s degree in Computer Science in December 2022).
• He has been working with professors on two research grants, and received his own grant fundin for an independent student research project.
• He has been vice president of one club.

Of all the colleges he considered, “It seemed like DSU had the best program with the most to offer for me,” Bernstein said, noting DSU’s several distinctions as Centers of Academic Excellence, and opportunities for research.

“Research was always a consideration of mine,” when looking at colleges, he stated.

Enrolling at Dakota State was a wise decision for the Newport, RI native, who said he has had a good experience here: “There are a lot of opportunities, despite it being a smaller school.” He has certainly taken advantage of the opportunities he’s found in classes, research, and extra-curricular activities, developing technical skills along the way.

Working with cyber security assistant professor Dr. Josh Stroschein and the MADRID Lab, he is helping develop a new tool for the automation of malware analysis. “If corporations respond to an incident such as a breach of network intrusion, often they’ll need to analyze that malware,” Bernstein explained. This can be time-consuming, so there is a need in the field to develop tools that can automate the process.

His work on a grant with Dr. Bramwell Brizendine is helping to develop a curriculum related to malware analysis. This will provide training to veterans who may want to start a career in the field.

“There is a huge number of unfilled positions in cyber so we need all the people we can get,” he said.

As part of the General Beadle Honors Program, Bernstein received a Student Mentored Research Initiative grant. “I have done a lot of work in my free time with penetration testing, which involves exercises to break into vulnerable machines,” he stated. He noticed there was not a lot of research in how to bypass modern antivirus solutions, so his project focused on this aspect of the problem.

Titled “Evading Modern Antivirus Detection,” his research findings can be used by antivirus companies to see deficiencies in detection software and improve its effectiveness; offensive security professionals can use the findings to see strengths and weaknesses of antivirus tools.

Bernstein notes that in addition to technical skills he has developed “soft skills,” such as time management.

“My interpersonal skills have also grown through this experience,” he said, through communication with professors and other students. He has also written a blog post on proxy scripts, part of a cooperation fostered between Stroschein and the ANY.RUN company.

As vice president of the Malware Club in 2020-2021, he has gained leadership experience. “Leadership is important,” he said, “and will definitely be helpful as I move up in my career.”

All these skills will help him with the job he will begin in the summer of 2021. Bernstein will work with Aon, in a cyber solutions training program; he will rotate throughout three different business units -- incident response, proactive testing, and compliance -- for nine months. At the end of the training, he will pick one area, and become a full-time consultant with the company. He is able to continue his graduate work throughout this process.

“It’s good to get this experience before I start a full-time job,” Bernstein said.

When he does begin his career, he would like to move into a managerial position, then possibly be in charge of information security for a Fortune 500 company.

His dream job would be to start his own company, related to some type of consulting in information security such as pen testing, or digital forensics, or developing different types of exploitation.

Cyber Operations (BS)

Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS)

Marissa Fick ‘21

Business Management (AS)

Dakota State was the only college Marissa Fick visited during her college search. “I loved the campus.”

Fick, a business management major from Luverne, Minn., lived on campus as a freshman and enjoyed the experience of meeting people in classes and Higbie Hall.

“I’m now finishing my degree online, and my experience continues to be positive,” she said. “I’m learning every day, and I feel well prepared for my future as a business professional.”

Fick has had several professors make lasting impacts on her during her time at DSU. From visiting Dr. Michael Gaylor for question and answer sessions, advice, and a joke, to Dr. Rob Girtz, Dr. Dan Talley, and Dr. Viki Johnson’s contributions to her business education.

Additionally, Dr. Deb Tech introduced Fick to Delta Mu Delta. Fick is an online student, yet she is still able to participate in school organizations like Kappa Sigma Iota Honor Society and Delta Mu Delta Honor Society for business students, where she serves as vice president.

“I really enjoy that DSU allows online students to stay connected, participating in similar activities and organizations as those on campus,” she said.

Fick recommends getting involved on campus to meet new people, learn new skills, and make the most out of time spent in college.

“No experience is wasted time,” she said. “Every experience I’ve had at DSU has had purpose, has set me up for where I am today, and will continue to lead me in the future.”

Additionally, she recommends taking advantage of all the resources students have. “Make connections with your professors, utilize tutoring and the Writing Center, attend job fairs, and talk with Career Services for résumé or interview help,” she shared. “Before you know it, you will be graduating.”

Fick hopes to work in Sioux Falls upon graduating in May. Her interests are focused in nonprofit work, human resources, operations, project management, and bookkeeping.

Business Management (AS)