UMGC Global Media Center
Dr. Calvin Nobles Comes Full-Circle Back to UMGC with Baldrige Award

This is kind of a full-circle moment for you, isn’t it?

Absolutely. I remember being in Iraq and seeing UMGC there back in 2005, 2006, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you can take college classes here.’ And so, I knew that UMGC was a university that serves learners not only during peacetime, but also in war. And when I was stationed back in Okinawa again, I started teaching in the MBA program. So, I have history with the university, and it’s been part of my DNA for a long time. And UMGC has always been at the forefront of cybersecurity.

How did you get started in cybersecurity and your focus on human factors, or how people’s behaviors, limitations and weaknesses affect security?

I was a naval aviator in the military, and I went to Aviation Safety Officer School, and we had a course on human factors. And from the moment that I started taking that course, I've just totally been enthralled with human factors as a discipline, as a profession, as a science, and I've never left it.

One of the things that really lit that fire is their laboratory, which was a warehouse of wrecked aircraft. The instructor would give some of the background about the crash and say, ‘Tell me what you think happened here.’ And I raised my hand and said, 'These two [pilots] were dogfighting,' because I was around the same age and I know what we do, right? And he said, 'You’re absolutely correct.’ 

How do you impart that to your students? How do you light the same fire that was lit in you?

Teaching human factors in cybersecurity is still in the infancy stage. I helped develop that course here at UMGC and at two other universities, and we used to say, 'Humans are the weakest link,' but that narrative gets old. And so now we say that humans are one of the major vulnerabilities in cybersecurity, because of the variability in the human element. We are all different, and so we might react to things differently. The stress, the onset of fatigue, the onset of burnout, you know, those factors weigh differently on each one of us. I really try to help people understand the human element. And then I also try to help people understand that we're going to make errors no matter what, because we're human. 

I try to help our students think about and understand how we can build systems by intentionally designing them for the people that operate them, whether it's in a cybersecurity system, whether it is someone working in human resources who's going to be complying with a cybersecurity policy, or whether it's somebody working in logistics who has to comply with an information security policy. How do we anticipate how a system is going to be attacked—which might be different from the way another system might be attacked? I ask students to think multi-dimensionally about how all these problems come together and how you solve them like an investigator.

How did you transition from the Navy to the banking world, and how did that inform what you teach your students?

When I retired from the military, I said, ‘You know what, I always wanted to work in corporate America.’ I was at a conference speaking on a panel and one of the vice presidents from Wells Fargo came up to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re looking for people like you.’ What made me such a great prospect for the banking industry was the cybersecurity work I did when I was in the military. I've always been nosy—I call it curious, but some people call it nosy. At Wells Fargo, I always got to put my nose in the business. And late one night, I was at home, and I was looking at some security controls and mapping them to industry standards, and I found two gaps. I immediately notified my boss and made recommendations to close them. A little while after that, he told me they did have someone get into the bank system through one of the places I identified. And because I was able to find that gap, the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. 

And so now you're in academia and passing that knowledge on. What’s the most important thing for learners to know?

One of the things that we're seeing in industry right now is that the entry level position is beginning to become obsolete because everybody's using AI. My challenge is to take college students and adult learners and advance them from zero to the equivalent of two or three years of experience. This is why we are doing more project-based work, more experiential leaning, more hands-on activity. 

I encourage students to have an insatiable appetite for information, because you grow. I always tell students, when I went to Wells Fargo, I said I never wanted to do application development. And I was able to steer away from application development for the first two years, but then I got the call to take it over. And it was a heavy lift. It was a very hard job. But I enjoyed it because I got to learn the bank very, very well.

There’s a real balance there between being an insatiable learner, taking every opportunity you can, contrasting with stress, fatigue and burnout, which is an area where you’ve done pivotal research. How do you help learners find that balance?

We will always have stressors in our life, whether it's from dealing with a sick parent or child, financial stress, or even if you're just living life and you're just not feeling like life is treating you very well. The military is an environment where it’s inherently stressful and fatiguing. 

I think it's very important that we design our programs with the learners in mind so they can be successful. Give them the resources they need, put everything within reach so they can attend class without distraction. 

And now you’ve received the Baldrige Award. Tell me about what that recognition means to you. 

I'll be honest, I was very shocked to get that call. There are probably less than 20 people in cybersecurity who have received it. And when you look at some of the people who won in the various categories, they’re famous people in their fields. I'm just so honored to be recognized for a lifetime achievement of working in cybersecurity and making places better. That's my goal—I would like for the organization to be better. It was that way when I was in the military. It was that way when I was at Wells Fargo, and it’s that way here at UMGC. How do I make it better? 

Learn more about cybersecurity programs at UMGC.