About

Today, the Cybersecurity Center continues to grow as a hub for research, education, and workforce development. The Center prepares the next generation of cybersecurity professionals through programs like CLDP (Cyber Leadership Development Program) and Scholarship for Service (SFS), which places graduates directly into federal roles. In 2026, we received a $2M NSF CyberAICorps grant to expand AI-focused training. Faculty and PhD researchers continue to grow innovative research and government partnerships, while the Center also runs K-12 outreach, public workforce development, and open-enrollment CompTIA certification courses.

In June 2017, Texas A&M was designated by the National Security Agency as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations. Alongside the previous CAE designations in Education and Research, Texas A&M is one of only a small number of universities to hold all three NSA distinctions.

In March 2016, TAMU was re-designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence, both in Education and in Research. These coveted distinctions align with the University’s mission to develop novel and innovative methods for cybersecurity education and to facilitate the conduct of ground-breaking, basic and applied cybersecurity research. More than 125 undergraduate students are enrolled for Fall 2016 in a newly created interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Minor field of study. And additional cybersecurity curricular offerings are currently under development, both at the undergraduate and graduate level.

The Texas A&M Cybersecurity Center is established under the direction of Dr. Daniel Ragsdale to meet the increasing demands of society for secured information infrastructures and for a knowledgeable cybersecurity workforce. Soon after the Center’s establishment, it receives a $475K grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to advance the knowledge of the cybersecurity of critical infrastructures.

Since 2010, TAMU faculty have published over 95 scholarly works that document both the basic and applied cybersecurity research they have performed. Additionally, during this same period, 105 graduate students completed theses or dissertations that addressed cybersecurity topics.

Building upon the early achievements, the university undertook a significant number of cybersecurity education and research initiatives under the direction of a strong faculty. In 2002, TAMU was first designated by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and was subsequently designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research.

Texas A&M University (TAMU) has been dedicated to the advancement of cyber defense since the early 1990’s. At that time, in response to a large-scale network attack, TAMU researchers developed a collection of defensive capabilities that, through open source distribution, became industry standard in higher education for more than a decade. In the late 1990’s, TAMU was the first academic institution to employ attack-defense laboratory exercises to support undergraduate computer security