Jesse Crenshaw

My name is Jesse Crenshaw. I grew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. I was raised by my grandparents in the Jefferson County area. I went to Hillview Elementary School, Bottenfield Middle School, and Minor High School. I graduated Miles College, a historically black college and university, in 2017 where I majored in Computer and Information Sciences as an undergraduate. I graduated with a gpa of 3.25. I was part of the Beta Kappa Chi Scientific Honor Society and Computer Science Technology Club. Currently I’m in the process of obtaining my Master’s degree in Computer Forensics and Security Management at the University of Alabama Birmingham. My plan in the long run is to work in some form of cyber security for either a government agency or private sector. I have interned at the National Science Foundation in the summer of 2018. I work as a graduate assistant in the computer forensics lab at my current institution.

While in the process of obtaining my Master’s degree, I work as a graduate assistance with my professor, Gary Warner. My professor takes a handful of students each year to help in the computer forensics lab. In the lab you can work as a programmer, digital forensics examiner, or malware analysis, depending on your preference and skills. I work as the digital examiner. We are split into two teams, financial fraud and terrorism. I work in financial fraud, what my team does is search facebook to look for post where users try to promote credit card cracking, trying to sale social security numbers, and card dumping. When we find these links we get information on the user and report it back to facebook. In some cases our professor has to go and testify in court about our findings.

During the summer of 2018 I interned in Washington, D.C. with the National Science Foundation in the Office of International Science and Engineering. I worked as a data analysis. I used data mining tools to gather information for the office. I found funding which were doing a cooperation with foreign nations. I ranked the countries based on their categories. Spending time in D.C. I attend a lot of networking events where I try to make connections to help in the future.