I spend my time on a narrow question with wide consequences: how do you engineer physical infrastructure so that a cyber attack can't turn into a blackout, a spill, or a shutdown?
For seven years I worked at the National Laboratory of the Rockies — formerly NREL — as a Senior Cybersecurity Researcher and Principal Investigator, a DOE federally funded research and development center. I led the Network and Communication Pillar of Liberty Eclipse, a DOE CESER full-scale national exercise validating grid recovery across highly distributed systems. I architected the ARIES Cyber Range into a high-fidelity environment capable of emulating multi-owner power systems and regional grids, so that defenses could be tested against representative infrastructure instead of simplified test beds.
Alongside that, I've spent a decade teaching. Graduate coursework at the Colorado School of Mines, professional training through the DOE OCIO-funded Cyber Fire Foundry program, and hands-on challenges at DEF CON's ICS Village. I care about the pipeline as much as the technology — the hardest problem in this field is not finding a vulnerability, it's producing engineers who design systems where the vulnerability doesn't matter.
gemma-pi: Multi-Agent Edge Inference InfrastructureHybrid local/cloud orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation grounded in local documentation, edge inference on a Hailo-10H NPU, and a custom-trained wake-word model (openWakeWord → ONNX) — the production agentic system Flux Constant Labs LLC builds and runs.Code on GitHub
Grokwell: An OT/ICS Incident-Response ChallengePhysical challenge built for DEF CON ICS Village 2026 — five Raspberry Pis in custom PLC enclosures driving a real HO-scale train, compromised by an agentic AI given a vague efficiency directive and no guardrails.Write-up on GitHub
Distributed Energy Resource Visual Emulator: Phase 1First authorMcFly, S., Peterson, J., Cryar, R., Reynolds, T. — National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2023doi.org/10.2172/1922814
Distributed Energy Resource Cybersecurity Framework and Cyber Range IntegrationFirst authorMcFly, S., Peterson, J., Reynolds, T. — National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2022doi.org/10.2172/1868050
Cyber-Informed Engineering Implementation GuideWright, V. L., Meng, J. P., Anderson, R. S., … McFly, S., et al. — Idaho National Laboratory / U.S. Department of Energy, 2023osti.gov/biblio/1995796
Alerga: Alert Aggregation and Reasoning in GOOSE Simulation PipelineBattista, J., Nahrstedt, K., Valdes, A., McFly, S. — 2023 IEEE SmartGridCommdoi.org/10.1109/SmartGridComm57358.2023.10333915
Cyber Across the Federal GovernmentPanel with Chris Inglis, former U.S. National Cyber Director, and federal cybersecurity leaders — University of Colorado Colorado Springs, March 2023Recording