Zach Lloyd presented his research at NIWC Pacific as part of his Cyber Service Academy (CSA) scholarship. Photo courtesy of Zach Lloyd.
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga doctoral student Zach Lloyd spent the summer at the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific in San Diego, using cybersecurity skills he developed at UTC to support U.S. Department of Defense research.
Lloyd completed the internship through a Cyber Service Academy (CSA) scholarship. NIWC Pacific brings together military and civilian scientists, researchers, engineers and technicians to support information warfare capabilities across military operations.
LTJG Lloyd joined the U.S. Navy in 2018 where he served as a Supply Corps officer on both a submarine and an amphibious assault ship.
Lloyd is a two-time graduate of UTC. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in entrepreneurship in 2014 and a master’s degree in data analytics with a focus on computer science in 2024. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s Computational Science program, focusing on cybersecurity.
“I primarily did logistics,” Lloyd said. “In my particular tour, I did money management and logistics, so ordering parts, that kind of thing. I also worked with food service and hazardous materials. On my second ship, I also worked in hotel services where I was in charge of entertaining VIPs and managing the living spaces for the commissioned officers.”
While acknowledging the necessity of the roles, he said they weren’t the right fit for him.
“I joined the Navy in the first place because I wanted to be part of that tactical environment,” said the Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, native. “It wouldn’t technically be ‘in the trenches’ in the Navy, but I wanted to be in the trenches. I wanted to be on the front line. I wanted to be active doing those things.
“It wasn’t where I felt that I could really flourish with the way that I work. The questions and problems that I was being asked to solve were not the ones that I wanted to solve.”
After his tour, he returned to UTC to work on his master’s degree and focused on the computer science side of the data analytics degree.
“As I got deeper into the computers, I realized this is probably where I want to be,” Lloyd said. “As I kept going with it, I got to the end of the degree and decided I wanted to keep doing this computer science and want to shift a little bit away from the business side of it.”
This led him to apply for a CSA scholarship from the U.S. Department of War and UTC’s Computer Science Ph.D. program.
Lloyd was one of 50 applicants chosen nationwide from nearly 700 scholarship applicants. In July 2025, he attended the DoW CSA boot camp at George Washington University. The boot camp introduced attendees to the scholarship program and provided contacts and information about their commitment.
As part of that commitment, Lloyd was required to complete an internship. He was assigned to NIWC Pacific, where he joined a team focused on model-based systems engineering.
“I worked on something called NetScry,” he explained. “So ‘scry’ basically means you’re peering into something, trying to extract information from it, and ‘net’ means network. The general idea is you take data from your computer network, put it into this program and it automatically builds a digital twin of your computer network.
“It’s a model, but it’s a model that’s constructed in such a level of depth that you’re able to utilize it to do things like visualization and experiments. You can run drills on it.”
This helps researchers like Lloyd run tests on the digital twin without using an operational network and without risking interference with operations.
According to Lloyd, his biggest contribution was using the digital twin and model to simulate how a firewall and virtual local area network work.
“I did that,” he said, “because what we wanted to see was whether we have a computer, a node, endpoint, device, server, if we have a node on one end of the network and it’s sending a message to another node on the other end of the network. We wanted to be able to see what path that message was going to be taking through that network.
“A VLAN allows you to arbitrarily segment your network without having to physically change the network. You don’t have to buy another switch to then separate things because those get expensive. It gives you more flexibility with how you want to set up your network.”
Lloyd said he enjoyed working with people from different backgrounds, both military and civilian, and called the “environment really good.”
Similarly, he has worked with professors from both the Gary W. Rollins College of Business and the College of Engineering and Computer Science, including Dr. Mengjun Xie, head of the Department of Computer Science and Lloyd’s doctoral program advisor.
“What stands out most about Zachary is his dedication, motivation, perseverance and focus,” Xie said. “He was not selected for the DoD CSA on his first attempt, but he did not give up. In January 2025, he applied again while also applying to UTC’s Computer Science Ph.D. program. When I reviewed his 2025 scholarship application, I was impressed by the substantial progress he had made in several areas. His growth and initiative caught my attention, and I decided to hire him as a research assistant.
“Zachary has a strong ‘can-do’ attitude and is willing to take on unfamiliar technical challenges. He also has strong communication and presentation skills and is able to explain complex technical concepts and processes clearly. At the same time, he is humble, polite, pleasant to work with, responsible and highly responsive. I believe these qualities, together with his technical ability and work ethic, will serve him very well throughout his career.”
Dr. Hemant Jain, W. Max Finley Chair in Business, Free Enterprise and Capitalism and director of the Journey Health Foundation Research Center for Health and Economic Analytics, echoed Xie’s comments.
“I’m also the director of the master’s program in data analytics, which we started about six or seven years ago,” Jain said. “We had a number of veterans in that program who have been some of our best students, and Zach was one of the bright spots.
“When we got the opportunity to start the Journey Health Center, he was the first student we hired in the center to help start collecting data. He was instrumental in going to publicly available sites for census data, healthcare data and CDC data, and he worked with a couple of other undergraduate students to download an initial set of data. He was the foundation for the center in that sense. Then he wanted to do a Ph.D. and decided to stay here in cybersecurity, which is a wonderful combination.”
Lloyd said he appreciated the flexibility UTC offers, which has enabled him to pursue a new career he is passionate about.
“Going from a business degree to a master’s in data analytics is not too much of a shift because, when I started, it was a joint program between the College of Business and the College of Engineering and Computer Science,” Lloyd said. “But then jumping from data analytics to something like computational science and cybersecurity, there’s a bit more of a gap you have to cover.
“I feel like there are other colleges and programs that basically wouldn’t even let you attempt something like that.”
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