Ju-Yeon Jo, Ph.D., is the Founding Executive Director of the Nevada Institute of Cybersecurity (NIC), a university-wide institute coordinating interdisciplinary cybersecurity research, education, and community engagement at UNLV. Prior to the establishment of NIC, she directed UNLV’s Cybersecurity Center, which has been designated by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD) since 2019.

She has led the development of UNLV’s cybersecurity ecosystem, serving as the institutional CAE Point of Contact since 2008 and overseeing UNLV’s CAE-CD designations by the NSA. She is the founder and faculty director of the UNLV Cyber Clinic, a student-led initiative providing free cybersecurity assessments and training to small businesses while offering students hands-on, real-world experience. She has also served as principal investigator for the NSA/NSF GenCyber program, leading multiple summer cybersecurity camps to strengthen Nevada’s K–12 cybersecurity pipeline.

Her research focuses on secure network protocols, security data analytics, and cybersecurity systems. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Energy (DoE), Small Business Administration (SBA), Google, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and holds patents in networking technologies.

Jo received her Ph.D. in computer science from Case Western Reserve University in 2003. Prior to joining UNLV, she served as an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento, and worked at Bell Laboratories and in the networking industry.