UWF Triumphs as Cyber Guardians, Achieves National Recognition

UWF Triumphs as Cyber Guardians, Achieves National Recognition

• UWF’s outreach work earned national recognition again.
• Second place in the 2024 CAE-CD Community Outreach Award Competition.
• Faculty, students and staff ran the outreach programs behind the award.
• The programs reach veterans, first responders, K-12 students and local governments.

Second place for community outreach

The University of West Florida (UWF) placed second in the 2024 CAE-CD Community Outreach Award Competition. The award comes from the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity community, the NSA-backed program that designates colleges for cyber education, and it goes to a school holding the Cyber Defense designation. UWF announced the result in April 2025. It has now finished in the top two three years running.

What UWF’s Center for Cybersecurity did

Training programs behind the ranking

Second in the nation is a team result. Staff at the UWF Center for Cybersecurity ran free training for veterans and first responders through the CyberSkills2Work program, plus free courses for state and local government employees through the Florida Cybersecurity Training Program. Students and faculty carried much of the rest.

Reaching schools and new learners

Much of the outreach targets people who might never have considered a security career. UWF Cyber Ambassadors visit K-12 schools in Northwest Florida with hands-on demos. The center’s GenCyber summer camps take rising 7th through 10th graders, and its Night of Cyber event introduces high school students and adult learners to the field.

Keeping the courses current

Hands-on tools

Students work with current tools in labs, including AI and machine learning applied to security problems. The aim is graduates who can step into a security operations job without months of retraining.

Security outside the computer science building

UWF also works security into other fields, including business and engineering. A finance graduate who understands phishing and access control is useful to an employer too.

Three years at the top

A steady record

UWF finished first in 2022 and second in 2023 before this second-place result, out of more than 450 eligible NCAE-C schools. That record is hard to put together. It reflects years of community events, camps and training, not one big push.

What other schools can borrow

Other colleges can copy the model. Free training for public employees, school visits and summer camps are not expensive, and they build a local pipeline of people who already know what a security job looks like when they apply.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.