Dr. Deanna House didn’t plan to research cybersecurity and deterrence. As a high school graduate, she didn’t even know what she wanted to study in college.
With the Y2K crisis on the horizon at that time, her father, a vocational educator, suggested a mainframe computer programming degree. It seemed a sensible choice, so she dove headfirst into the technical world, earning her associate’s degree in computer programming.
"After getting my mainframe degree, sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen all day proved to be the opposite of what I found interesting," Dr. House explained. "I was intrigued by the people side of IT. So much so that I decided to study it."
While working full time in human resources, she earned a bachelor’s degree in human resource management from Bellevue University and a master’s in management information systems from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). She found a role as a business systems analyst, which was the perfect blend of people and technology. This provided her with the opportunity to step away from her desk to explore how people interacted with technology.
Dr. House earned her doctorate in information systems in 2013 and then served as an assistant professor of management information systems at Ohio University until 2017. From there she had a three-year stint as an assistant professor of cybersecurity, alongside two years as the associate director of the Center for Ethics at the University of Tampa.
Dr. House proudly returned to UNO in 2020 as an assistant professor of information systems and quantitative analysis and studying what she finds most interesting — connections among technology and people.
"The UNO College of Information Science and Technology (IS&T) provides an environment of access to students and research from a variety of technical disciplines, such as management information systems and cybersecurity — where my areas of teaching and research lie," Dr. House said. "I wanted to be a part of it. Being exposed to the research projects that my colleagues are involved in is very motivating for me."
Settled into her role, Dr. House has built and taught undergraduate and graduate cybersecurity risk management, cybersecurity policies and privacy, computer security management, and advanced systems analysis and design. She has conducted multiple studies and published research on behavioral cybersecurity such as “Phishing: Message Appraisal and the Exploration of Fear and Self-Confidence” and “Politeness in Security Directives: Insights in Browser Compliance for the Human Element.”
She joined forces with Dr. Michelle Black, UNO associate professor of political science, to offer her talents to multi-actor deterrence analysis methodology (MADAM), which was developed and tested during a project, Enabling Coherent Deterrence – A Multi-Actor Approach. The project was initially funded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and through the National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI) at the University of Nebraska, which serves as one of only 15 University Affiliated Research Centers designated by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). With additional seed funding awarded through a university process NSRI helps facilitate, Dr. House officially joined the national security enterprise.
"Defense work is a completely different world from the private sector, and I had a lot to learn," she said. "Working with NSRI has been invaluable in helping me understand DOD clients’ needs. In January of 2021, I became an NSRI Fellow and learned even more about the research, participated in all of the events and figured out how my own research can be utilized through these partnerships."
The defense industry’s need for multidisciplinary expertise and the ever-changing nature of research, due to emerging technology and rapidly expanding sophisticated threats, have been an excellent fit for Dr. House and her skills.
Through her collaborative efforts with Dr. Black and the success of the MADAM framework, UNO stood up the Nebraska Deterrence Lab in 2022. Dr. House serves as co-director, offering her skills to accomplish the lab’s mission “to conduct academically based research on integrated multi-actor deterrence, multi-actor quantitative risk and decision-making” and supporting work for the FBI, U.S. Strategic Command and NATO.
Dr. House’s role also expands far beyond research to education, and she works to incorporate students into all of her efforts. In her graduate-level systems analysis and design course, for example, students gain valuable experience working with the U.S. military to help make the world safer. Since 2020, the class has solved more than 35 DOD challenges. She was recently recognized with as the 2024 UNO Service Learning Award recipient for the class.
Wade Watts, a regional engagement principal for the National Security Innovation Network, has worked with Dr. House and her classes for the last four years, canvassing DOD organizations for problems Dr. House’s students can work on.
"She has a naturally inquisitive personality and intense hunger for knowledge." he said. "She can go from knowing little about a subject to becoming an expert in a short period of time to solve real-world problems. As an instructor, she is approachable, demands excellence without being overbearing, and teaches students how to think through problems to arrive at amazingly effective solutions."
To Dr. House, mentoring up-and-coming researchers is critical. She sees teaching as essential to developing future talent for the DOD and the lab's research capacity. At the time of this writing, she was working with 41 students on eight concurrent projects.
"The classes give students a new perspective of the DOD and help them see it as a place where they could work," she said. "I hope to make them better critical thinkers, so they are better prepared for the workforce. The perspectives that they bring into the projects are valuable to their DOD clients to solve problems that they do not have resources to focus on. These projects also allow me to extend my research capacity. They involve things like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and network infrastructure that I wouldn’t otherwise have the time or availability to work on."
The transitions to cybersecurity researcher, workforce developer and national security problem solver have brought Dr. House profound professional fulfillment.
"I’m thinking about hard problems most people in industry don’t have time to think about," she explained. "Lately, I’ve focused on the multidisciplinary aspects of cyber — and the number of large scale of attacks happening everywhere across critical infrastructure."
Highly-publicized cyberattacks in recent years have demonstrated how hard it can be to stop attackers, whether they are lone-wolf hackers or powerful foreign nations. It can be even harder to determine who is behind an attack.
"So many things have come into play with cyber," Dr. House said. "It’s a messy, complicated thing. When someone shoots a missile, it can be obvious where it came from. Attributing a cyberattack to a particular actor is challenging."
Dr. House’s many years in programming and IT provide necessary technical knowledge. However, to successfully defend against cyberattacks, it is just as critical to consider attackers’ motives and develop ways to discourage them from attacking in the first place.
Her path from cyber technology to deterrence psychology gives Dr. House an ideal mix of real-world experience, specialized expertise and deep understanding to meet these challenges. With her, her students and her colleagues considering threats from every angle, the Nation is safer.
