Brandon Packard, PhD

Dr. Brandon Packard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing and Engineering Technology at Pennsylvania Western University, where he also serves as an Assistant Department Chair. Brandon serves on faculty senate and its General Education Subcommittee, as well as on many different committees within the department.  He is the Program Lead for Applied Technology and the Co-Lead for Applied Computing.  In addition, he serves on the LGBTQIA+ commission and the Honors Program Advisory Board.

He also volunteers for Vex Robotics every year, and is the Northwest Regional Director for the Pennsylvania Science Olympiad.  His list of accolades includes the Vex Robotics Volunteer of the year, the Social Equity Office's Special Equity award, and PASSHE's Keeper of the flame award.

In addition to presenting papers at the PACISE conference each year, he has also completed well over 100 courses on Programming and Data Science/Analytics topics on DataCamp, and earned many Programming and Data Analytics related certificates in his free time -including the Data Scientist Associate Certification and the ITS Databases Certification. He uses this knowledge in his side job, being an adjunct instructor for a Data Science course with an education company called NuPaths.

Finally, Brandon's research interests include Video Games, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science/Analytics, as well as the ethical questions raised in each of these areas – but he is always happy to assist students with their own areas of research as well!