Brian Canada, PhD

I am a Professor of Computational Science and Chair of the Department of Computer Science & Mathematics at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, where I have served as a faculty member since 2011. I'm a computational biologist by training; I hold a PhD in Integrative Biosciences with an option in Bioinformatics and Genomics as well as a graduate minor in Computational Science from Penn State University, where my dissertation focused on the automatic detection and characterization of morphological abnormalities in mutant zebrafish using machine learning and image processing. In addition, I hold a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, also from Penn State. Between my undergraduate and graduate years I worked as an engineer in the chemical process industry, chiefly for ExxonMobil.

My research has been published in various ACM and IEEE conference proceedings, the Springer journal Multimedia Tools & Applications, the Wolters Kluwer Arbitration Blog, as well as a major book chapter on crustacean biodiversity from Oxford University Press. In addition, I am the creator of the award-winning South Carolina folklore-themed indie video game Bugs 'N Boo Hags, which was successfully funded via Kickstarter in 2019, is currently available for Windows PCs on Steam Early Access, and is presently being reworked as a deluxe edition for mobile devices.

At USCB, I presently teach a number of undergraduate, graduate, and interdisciplinary courses related to object-oriented programming in Java, the digital humanities, full-stack software engineering and testing, agile practices in video game production, and high-performance computing.