Our Team
Melissa Dark, PhD
Melissa Dark has worked in cybersecurity education for the past 23 years. She has led several creative and impactful projects. Her early work in cybersecurity education focused on the graduate level and has progressively grown down to community college, and now high school, in response to two needs: robust cybersecurity literacy among all cybercitizens and closing the cybersecurity workforce gap. She was a professor and associate dean at Purdue University. In 2015, she founded DARK Enterprises, Inc., a non-profit that focuses on cybersecurity education Development, Assessment, Research and Knowledge Transfer.
Teach Cyber is one of the cybersecurity education projects within DARK Enterprises, Inc.
Jenny Daugherty, PhD
Jenny L. Daugherty, Ph.D. is the Research and Curriculum Lead for DARK Enterprises. Jenny has over 20 years of experience working in educational research, program evaluation, and curriculum/teacher professional development. Prior to joining DARK Enterprises, Inc., she spent over a decade in higher education, managing a high school curriculum development project in technology education, leading teacher professional development workshops, and managing a STEM education center at Illinois State University, researching teacher professional development at Purdue University where she earned tenure as an Associate Professor and serving as the Director of the Leadership Development Institute at Louisiana State University. Jenny has published 18 articles in peer-reviewed STEM education journals highlighting her research on teacher professional development. Jenny has also served as a program evaluator on several projects including Illinois State University’s Illinois CTE project and Sacramento State’s Scholarship for Service program. She was a member of the site visit team for the GenCyber program and contributed to the 5-Year Evaluation report conducted by DARK Enterprises. In terms of cybersecurity curriculum work, Jenny was a developer of the High School Cybersecurity Curriculum Guidelines supported by the National Cryptologic Foundation and Teach Cyber, a project dedicated to providing curricular resources, training, and support to high school teachers. In her role at DARK Enterprises, Jenny supports the design and development of innovative, impactful, and methodologically-sound cybersecurity education programs, research projects, and evaluation approaches.
Nancy Stevens
Nancy Stevens is a data specialist and curriculum creator for DARK Enterprises. She has written curriculum for Teach Cyber and the Catalyzing Computing and Cybersecurity in Community Colleges (C5) projects. Nancy has contributed to research and evaluation projects. She served on site visitation teams for the GenCyber program. Prior to joining DARK Enterprises, she taught AP Computer Science Principles, Python Programming, and Intro to Computer Science in North Carolina. She has led numerous workshops in Computer Science education. Nancy was inducted into the North Carolina Business Educator Hall of Fame in 2016, and was the honored recipient of the Dr. Orus Sutton Award in 2017. She has a BA in Business Management from the University of Northern Iowa, MA in Education from East Carolina University, and CompTIA Security+ certification.
Sabrina Smiley
Sabrina Smiley joined the Dark Enterprises Inc. team in 2017 as the copy editor/editor. Over time, that role evolved into a development manager. At Dark Enterprises Inc. and its subsidiary Teach Cyber, Sabrina assists with data integration, teacher professional development, curating cybersecurity content and engages with support agencies and partners. Before joining Dark Enterprises Inc., Sabrina was a special education teacher. Response to Instruction (RtI) is one of the primary connections between her work before coming to Dark Enterprises Inc. and her work at Dark Enterprises Inc. Sabrina earned both her undergraduate and master’s from Ball State University. When Sabrina is not keeping busy with cybersecurity education initiatives, you can find her spending time with her family, walking her mini golden doodle, Maple, or volunteering at her church.