Dr. Vincent J. Nestler is the John M. Pfau Endowed Professor and 2025–26 Outstanding Professor at California State University, San Bernardino, where he directs the Center for Cyber and AI in the School of Cyber and Decision Sciences. He is a contributing member of the OpenAI Red Teaming Network (2024–2026), individually credited in five publicly released System Cards (GPT-4o, o1, o3-mini, Operator, and Deep Research) for adversarial testing across text, image, video, voice, and agentic AI systems. He is principal investigator on the NSF "AI Horizon" project, which forecasts how cybersecurity curricula must adapt to AI, and co-author of the CyberAI Knowledge Area Frameworks for cybersecurity programs in the age of artificial intelligence. His writing on Kasparov's Law and the new definition of hirable, the argument that the work worth hiring for is work neither a human nor an AI can do alone, is the basis of the curriculum model he presents here.

He founded the Virtual Cyber Career Challenge, a national capstone program whose Spring 2026 cycle was part of a 15-day live exercise that ran AI-augmented red teams against 69 AI-built and AI-defended blue-team enterprises. That exercise followed a mid-semester decision to throw out the syllabus for two undergraduate classes and rebuild them around a three-week-old agentic AI framework, with students deploying it on both offense and defense and defending credentials to a university-hosted inference cluster under live attack. Several of those students were interviewed and hired before the term ended. He runs the CSUSB Cyberlab that made it possible, an on-premises Proxmox cluster with a GPU-backed vLLM tier serving open-weight models to students behind single sign-on.

Before academia he served twenty years in the U.S. Marine Corps, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer 2 in Electronics and Data Communications Maintenance. He holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Design with an emphasis in Information Assurance from Idaho State University, an M.S. in Network Security from Capitol College, and an M.A. from Columbia University. He was principal investigator on the NSF- and NIST-funded NICE Challenge Project, now a national model serving more than 700 institutions, and is lead author of McGraw-Hill's Principles of Computer Security Lab Manual (multiple editions, including a Chinese edition with Tsinghua University Press) and author of Norwich University's Competency in Cybersecurity Education. Across his career he has secured more than $40M in federal cybersecurity and AI-education funding as PI or Co-PI, and his talks run from democratizing open-source LLMs for education and research to what competency-based instruction looks like when the workforce, the adversary, and the classroom are all changing at the speed of AI.