I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Spelman College. My research in wireless and physical-layer security is what keeps my systems teaching current; my classroom is where that research has to earn its keep, one cohort of students at a time.
My courses follow one continuous pathway through the machine. Students meet each layer as a thing they can build, measure, and break, not as a diagram to memorise. Select a stage:
Students begin by writing and reading real programs in C++, building the habit of tracing what code does before asking what the machine does with it.
The core of the pathway: instruction sets, datapath and control, pipelining, and the memory hierarchy, taught with a paired hands-on laboratory.
First serious programming: disciplined problem-solving in C++, with lab work that connects every language construct to what the machine is actually doing.
Next semester I teach SCIS 121 alongside the new Operating Systems / Computer Architecture laboratory (SCIS 343L), which extends the pathway to processes, virtual memory, and scheduling.
Spring 2027Teaching well in my own classroom is the floor, not the ceiling. These are the projects through which my teaching is meant to outlast my own course schedule: materials and structures other instructors can adopt.
Adaptable laboratory modules for computer organization, architecture, and operating systems, with staged milestones and verifiable checkpoints, published openly so colleagues can adopt, remix, and improve them. The collection is live and growing: ten modules so far, from a first look inside QtSpim to a capstone in which students build their own MIPS assembler in C++. github.com/ebukaoguchi/systems-labs
LiveAs a collaborator on the Google.org Cybersecurity Clinic at Spelman, I work on integrating real, client-facing security work for under-resourced organisations into the undergraduate cybersecurity curriculum, service and coursework reinforcing each other.
Large systems courses run on their teaching teams. Planned: structured preparation and mentoring for the undergraduate TAs and peer mentors who staff labs and office hours, because students often learn the pathway first from someone one step ahead of them on it.
PlannedMy systems pathway generates its own research questions: about learning rather than about networks. Current lines of inquiry:
Classroom studies run with ethics approval, and results, including negative ones, are shared with the computing-education community (SIGCSE, ITiCSE) so that other instructors can build on them.
Mentoring is where the pathway becomes personal. At Spelman I mentor undergraduate researchers through their first systems and security projects: framing a question, building the experiment, and presenting the result. I am a recipient of the Google CS Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP) and a member of the Institute for African American Mentoring in Computing Sciences (iAAMCS); the students I have mentored include a Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and undergraduate researchers at Spelman.
I was selected as Spelman’s faculty fellow for the ACS Teaching & Learning Workshop at Rollins College (2026), a programme devoted to evidence-based, inclusive teaching in liberal-arts settings.
My technical research develops authentication, message-integrity, and trust-establishment mechanisms for emerging wireless and cyber-physical systems. It is the reason my systems courses can teach security as a property of every layer, and it continues alongside my teaching, through the NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing, where I am a collaborator. Selected work:
Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, EAI SecureComm, and ACM WiSec. Judge, Spelman College Hack-A-Bot Competition (2026).