Our Principal
& Founder

Sawtooth Digital Forensics is led by Dr. Michael A. Haney, a cybersecurity researcher, educator, and practitioner with thirty years of experience across industry, academia, government agencies, and national-laboratory research.

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His work spans critical infrastructure and ICS/SCADA security, digital forensics, and the secure and trustworthy deployment of AI systems.

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Dr. Haney holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from the University of Tulsa, where his dissertation addressed privacy-preserving methods in network security monitoring, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. He has held faculty positions at the University of Idaho where he was tenured in 2021, the University of Tulsa, and Idaho State University, and maintained a joint-appointment with Idaho National Laboratory's Cybercore Integration Center — one of the nation's premier energy- and infrastructure-security research environments. He founded and directed the Idaho Cyber Range and served as Program Manager for the Idaho Cybersecurity Education Initiative, coordinating cybersecurity curriculum and workforce development initiatives across eight institutions of higher education statewide.

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His research record comprises more than sixty peer-reviewed publications, a U.S. patent in distributed privacy-preserving security monitoring, and over $18 million in externally funded research from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NIST, the National Security Agency, and Idaho National Laboratory. His work has earned Best Paper recognition from the ACM Cyber and Information Security Research Conference (2014) and the American Nuclear Society (2019).

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Most recently, Dr. Haney developed and delivered two courses — Fundamentals of Applied and Industrial AI and Secure and Trustworthy AI Systems — supporting AI programs at both the University of Tulsa and Idaho State University, and served on AI task forces at both institutions.

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He holds a PhD in Computer Science, the CISSP (held since 2002), and four additional GIAC certifications. He is based in East Idaho.  And he is passionate about securing all corners of cyberspace and educating all those willing and able to learn and help the cause.