Bio

Dr. Bryson Payne is the founding Director of the Center for Cyber Operations Education at the University of North Georgia, an NSA Center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense. He is also a tenured professor of computer science at UNG, where he has taught aspiring coders and cyber professionals since 1998. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP®) and Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and holds the elite SANS|GIAC GPEN certification, among other industry certifications. He was also the first Department Head of Computer Science at UNG and enjoys working with K-12 schools worldwide to promote computer science education. He is also a TEDx speaker on coding and cybersecurity.

Teach Your Kids to Code (2015) – by Bryson Payne

Featured in CIO magazine, Campus Technology, and the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Payne is the best-selling author of  Teach Your Kids to Code: A Parent-Friendly Guide to Python Programming (2015, No Starch Press) , now published in six languages (Russian, Chinese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, and English), and Learn Java the Easy Way (2017, No Starch Press). He’s a popular online instructor with over 28,000 students from more than 160 countries, including his top-rated Udemy course, Real-World Ethical Hacking (2017).

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia State University and has published articles in scholarly and trade journals, in addition to speaking regularly at national and international conferences on computer science and cybersecurity education.

Dr. Payne has been programming computers for over 30 years; he sold his first paid program to RUN Magazine (Commodore 64) for their “Magic” column in 1985, for $10. In addition to his affinity for technology, Dr. Payne speaks Spanish and French, and is conversational in Russian and Mandarin Chinese.

He lives north of Atlanta with his lovely wife Bev, and two sons, Alex and Max.