Dr. Guillermo A. Francia, III joined the University of West Florida Center for Cybersecurity in 2018. Previously, Dr. Francia served as the Director of the Center for Information Security and Assurance and held a Distinguished Professor position at Jacksonville State University. Dr. Francia is a recipient of numerous cybersecurity research and curriculum development grants. His projects have been funded by prestigious institutions such as the National Science Foundation, Eisenhower Foundation, Department of Education, Department of Defense, and Microsoft Corporation. 

His scholarly interests include critical infrastructure security, connected vehicle security, security standards, and regulatory compliance and audit, radio frequency signal security, industrial control systems (ICS) security, machine learning (ML) for security, and digital badging for learning and employment records (LERs). In 1996, Dr. Francia received one of the five national awards for Innovators in Higher Education from Microsoft Corporation. 

He served as a Fulbright scholar to Malta in 2007 and a US-UK Fulbright Cybersecurity research scholar to Imperial College London in the United Kingdom in 2017. Dr. Francia is the recipient of the 2018 National CyberWatch Center Innovations in Cyber Security Education — Faculty Development Category Award.