Faculty Spotlights
Our faculty bring decades of industry experience from AT&T Bell Labs, Cleveland Clinic, Lockheed Martin, Progressive Insurance and more—alongside world-class academic credentials. They're active researchers publishing in top-tier journals and securing competitive grants.
Dr. Augustine (Gus) Samba knows what it takes to build systems that work in the real world — because he spent 18 years doing exactly that at AT&T Bell Labs, developing research and solutions for major telecommunications providers. His applied research has earned him patents in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Korea, with his most recent U.S. patent awarded through Kent State for a system that performs real-time monitoring and fault diagnosis of wireless networks.
In the classroom, Samba channels that industry depth into the Computer Science capstone experience, where student teams design and build complex systems from the ground up — gathering requirements, developing architecture to IEEE standards, and solving for performance, security, reliability and error recovery. His goal is straightforward: teach students not just to build a system, but to build the right system, the right way.
Dr. Hassan Peyravi's career sits at the intersection of foundational research and real-world network infrastructure. As a member of technical staff in the Chief Architecture Group at AT&T Bell Labs, he contributed to the design and development of broadband ISDN networks and the Internet backbone — the kind of large-scale systems that millions rely on daily.
At Kent State, where he serves as Professor of Computer Science and Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Computer Science and Data Science, Peyravi has built a research program with impressive reach. His work on network systems, traffic management and performance evaluation has attracted funding from NASA's Space Communication Division, the National Science Foundation, CAIDA, Internet2 and Cisco Systems — spanning challenges from Mars mission communications to cybersecurity.
His publications appear in top venues including IEEE, ACM, and Elsevier, and his research interests continue to push into emerging areas like cloud computing architecture, IoT sensor networks and data center systems. For graduate students in networking, his lab is where theory meets serious application.
Dr. Gregory DeLozier
Few faculty can claim experience across as many high-stakes industries as Gregory DeLozier, Ph.D. Over a 40-plus year career, he has written mission-critical software for the Space Shuttle and SpaceLab, built flight simulator tools for the U.S. Air Force at Lockheed Martin, developed network monitoring software for the Cleveland Clinic through TRW and created security-compliance and IT reliability systems at Progressive Insurance — where a machine-learning system he developed earned a U.S. patent.
At Cleveland Clinic, DeLozier headed an innovations incubator, leading the development of licensed surgical planning tools and pulmonary implants — a testament to how far computer science reaches when applied with imagination and rigor.
A Kent State Computer Science Ph.D. alumnus himself, DeLozier returned to the university where he earned his doctorate to help shape the next generation of computer science graduates. His teaching is grounded in hard-won industry experience: the kind that comes from building systems where failure isn't an option, whether in orbit, on the operating table or inside a Fortune 500 data center.
Dr. Jonathan Maletic has spent his career solving hard problems in software -- from military logistics to automotive systems to the tools that software engineers themselves rely on. At Honeywell's Systems and Research Center, he built a production-quality temporal reasoning system used for Department of Defense logistics planning. He went on to consult for Ford Motor Company on client-server and web application development and provided litigation technical support to the Arizona Department of Transportation on software verification, validation and performance simulation.
In 2014, Maletic founded srcML LLC, providing software analysis and consulting solutions to clients including international firms in the U.S. and Australia -- a reflection of how his academic research has direct, practical impact in the field.
At Kent State, he leads the Software Development Modeling Laboratory, where his team develops methods and tools to help engineers analyze, understand and transform large-scale software systems undergoing evolution. His lab's flagship tool, srcML, enables lightweight analysis and manipulation of source code across multiple programming languages. A Senior Member of both ACM and IEEE, Maletic has been a fixture of the software engineering research community for over three decades.