Prior to joining Nova, he taught at Florida Atlantic University, served as VP for Technology at a firewall startup, and was a member of the technical staff at HP Labs in Palo Alto. Earlier he worked on data analysis at Harvard University, code development at IBM Research, and signal processing for the French government. Dr. Van Hilst earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and holds three degrees from MIT. He is the author of more than 40 articles on security and software engineering.