Alan Adame: computer scientist, Army captain

Alan Adame points to a picture of himself jumping
out of a plane during his time as a paratrooper.

Alan Adame is a master’s student in the computer science and engineering department at UC San Diego, studying computer science. He’s also a captain in the U.S. Army, preparing for a tour as a research scientist at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point University.

A West Point graduate himself, Adame was commissioned to the Army as a signal officer, and deployed to Iraq as a platoon leader in 2010, not long after earning his degree.

“My job there was basically to start getting everything ready so we could hand it over to the Iraqi Army,” Adame said. “The fiber optic cable, anything we dealt with as far as communications— if the Iraqi Army wasn’t familiar with it, we would train them.”

After he returned from Iraq, Adame was stationed in Ft. Bragg, N.C. with the 82^nd Airborne Division of paratroopers. There, he was tasked with ensuring everyone in the division had the platforms and systems they needed to be able to communicate on the same network. All while jumping out of planes, of course.

“No matter what you do—cook, HR personnel, whatever your job is—you jump out of an airplane,” he said. “The 82^nd Airborne is a Global Response Force—the country’s 911. When a disaster happens, we deploy there to help. It’s the best job in the world.”

He performed well enough in that role that he was selected to attend graduate school, and is in his fourth quarter of the computer science master’s degree program at UC San Diego. There is no jumping out of planes, but Adame said the curriculum is challenging.

“It’s hard. I didn’t think it was going to be this hard. From the military perspective, whenever you get to do this type of opportunity it’s seen like you get to take a break, but this is not like that,” he said. “It’s been really tough. What we’re learning is cool, but it’s challenging.”

He said the atmosphere reminds him of his paratrooper days in some ways, since he’s surrounded by people at the top of their field.

“Here, academically, everybody is really, really smart. You’re trying to hang with everybody so it’s challenging mentally. Where there, everyone is really good physically. Everybody is at the top of their game, is driven, is always trying to do the right thing and work hard.”

Adame has always been interested in computers and started programming at the age of 12, so the opportunity to work as a research scientist and instructor at the recently established Army Cyber Institute is an exciting one.

“The interesting part about it is that the Center was just stood up a few years ago, and the cyber branch within the Army is a recent addition as well," Adame said. "If you’re going to be an infantryman or artillery, you can find all these field manuals that say ‘This is how you do this, this is how you plan this operation.’ Basically, what the Army Cyber Institute is doing is putting together research so we can formalize that branch to establish these kind of standards.”