The thriving Illinois community is made up of members of all kinds—students, faculty, staff, volunteers, affiliates, alumni—and many Tech Services staff have long been part of many of these groups. While working full-time for Tech Services, many staff have also served as adjunct faculty and instructors on campus.
Specifically, four of our staff have talked about how working full-time at Tech Services while teaching has helped shape their sense of the Illinois community and have benefitted both roles. Read about Michael Curtin. Read about Ashley Hetrick. Read about Geet Verma.
Today, we share about Larry Dunham, assistant director, Digital Risk Management and instructor in the computer science department at the University of Illinois Springfield.
After saying yes to his graduate school advisor’s request to teach three sections of “Introduction to Operating Systems” in 2013, Larry Dunham has taught at the University of Illinois Springfield ever since, while being a full-time worker at Tech Services at Illinois.
With his full-time role being assistant director, digital risk management, Dunham oversees digital risk management as part of the Identity, Privacy and Cybersecurity group at Tech Services. Daily, Dunham and his team of professionals work to ensure that Privacy and Cybersecurity risks in university projects, third party services and the research community are understood while aligning their programs to the larger university strategic goals. Dunham and his Digital Risk Management team work to protect the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and also the University of Illinois Springfield.
When not working to provide the university with actionable information about digital risk, Dunham teaches in the Computer Science department at the University of Illinois Springfield.
“Teaching university students gives me a broader perspective on the needs of our academic community and keeps them fresh in my mind as I pursue my assigned full-time duties,” Dunham said. “In my daily work with Tech Services, I do not interact very much with students, and teaching keeps me focused on students as the reason we are all here. Teaching enables me to focus on students’ well-being and scholarship as a central part of the university’s strategic objectives,”
Dunham was Chief Technology Officer for a financial services company in Springfield, Illinois while completing his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Illinois Springfield. Though he had experience in system administration and software development languages, his career led him into information security, and this is what eventually led him to his role at Tech Services (then called CITES). At Tech Services, Dunham managed the university’s PCI network, built the university’s first Duo self-service portal and started the Governance, Risk, and Compliance function at Illinois with a security assessment of the university’s data centers.
Dunham’s work at Tech Services integrates with his teaching in different ways. “In my virtual classroom, I am responsible for boiling down risk management principles into bite-size concrete pedagogical exercises for my course. Creating the course helped me focus on evolving elements of Tech Services’ risk management program one step at a time–into what it is today,” Dunham said.
“There are still some significant pieces of the framework that we have not implemented at Illinois. Every time I teach the elements of IT risk management course, it makes me think about what we can do next to mature our university’s digital risk management program,” Dunham said.
Over the years, Dunham has taught Introduction to Operating Systems (CSC 389), Systems Security and Information Assurance Capstone (CSC 438), Computer Programming Concepts 2 (CSC 275) and Information Security Risk Management (CSC 470). He has also done work to create and improve course curriculums in subjects he teaches.
Dunham has also been involved with leading various risk management groups within the Big Ten Academic Alliance, as well as serving on various university groups and committees where risk management intersects university operations.