Sam McQuade is a professor and graduate program coordinator for the cross-disciplinary professional studies master’s degree program in RIT’s Center for Multidisciplinary Studies.

He has 30 years of experience as a practitioner, teacher and researcher of criminal justice and security. He is a former Air National Guard security police officer, deputy sheriff, police officer and detective, police organizational change consultant, National Institute of Justice program manager for the U.S Department of Justice, and study director for the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences. He participated in and directed federally funded grant research projects on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice and Congress.

McQuade completed doctoral degree studies in 2001 at George Mason University, School of Public Policy, in Fairfax, Va. His dissertation combined content analysis, history construction and archival records analysis methodologies to articulate and provisionally test aspects of a new theory for understanding the technological co-evolution and perpetual relative complexity of crime, policing and security. In 1994, he earned a Master of Public Administration Degree from the University of Washington, Graduate School of Public Affairs. In 1992, he earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Human Services Management from the Western Washington University, Woodring College of Education.

McQuade has received numerous honors and awards, including a Presidential Management Internship award that placed him at NIJ in 1994 where he managed computer crime and other technology-related social science and criminal justice research projects. While in Washington, D.C., he also provided independent consulting services to the Urban Institute, among other clients, and served as Deputy Director of Research and Resource Development at the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. In that capacity he worked with technology developers to experiment with new applications of crime and intelligence analysis software.

McQuade currently teaches courses in multidisciplinary professional studies including those relating specifically to high tech crime, information security, and infrastructure assurance. His textbook, Understanding and Managing Cybercrime, published by Allyn & Bacon (2006), provides an introduction to these and related topics. He has also taught several professional courses including grants administration and research methods at training institutions such as the FBI National Law Enforcement Academy in Quantico, Va. His university teaching experience includes adjunct faculty instruction at the University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice; and for both the Department of Sociology and the Department of Political Science at George Mason University. He has authored scholarly papers and awarded grants, managed peer reviews of grant proposals and book manuscripts, and presented and moderated at academic and practitioner conferences in areas of law enforcement, criminal justice and security technology administration, high tech crime and human services management and education.