Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Corey Leong later moved to and grew up in Englewood, Florida. He attended Lemon Bay High School where he took an interest in computer science specifically programming computers to play games. After finishing high school, Corey attended the University of South Florida (USF). While there he studied business related courses such as accounting and economics. However, his real interests were, once again, in computers and programming. Therefore, he studied the area of information systems for businesses. He later earned a bachelor of science degree in management of information systems from USF.

After graduating, Corey continued to work for the athletics department at USF. As the assistant director of operations, he worked before, during, and after athletic events while managing various athletic operations such as ticketing, security, and managing staff. The sports management area was of interest to him since he was previously an athlete having played baseball and basketball. After a few years of working in the USF Athletics Department, a new opportunity presented itself. The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL) needed a webmaster to oversee its website and internal network operations in the St. Petersburg office. Corey felt that he was a good fit for the position due to his MIS undergraduate degree and sports management background. Therefore, he applied to the position in which he eventually accepted the position’s duties and responsibilities.

After working for the NAPBL, Corey worked for a variety of technology companies including startups. One such company was JHT Incorporated located in the University of Central Florida (UCF) Research Park. While there, Corey helped develop training manuals for service men and women in combat overseas. Java and XML were just two technologies used to program the technical documents according to the United States Army’s technical specifications. Another technology company was the telecommunication company CenturyLink located in Winter Park. While there, Corey worked as a software engineer developing online portals for CenturyLink network engineers to use. These portals supported network engineers’ provisioning of internet, phone, and cable services to CenturyLink customers across the United States. While working at CenturyLink, Corey became interested in higher education for potentially researching nonprofit organizations in the Internet space such as the Internet Society and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

With this new found interest, Corey applied to the UCF’s graduate program for nonprofit management offered by the College of Health and Public Affairs. After being accepted into the program, he worked towards earning his master degree while working at CenturyLink. After completing the M.N.M. program, Corey grew interested in education and online learning, specifically e-learning. He applied and was accepted into the instructional design and technology program at UCF. While working towards his master in e-learning, he applied to the modeling and simulation (M&S) program’s master of science program. His motivation for applying to the M&S program was to research and develop new internet protocols he had started to develop while working at CenturyLink. Because he was working with network protocols on a daily basis, Corey grew fascinated with messaging protocols and how they worked over the internet. He was later accepted into the M&S program.

After earning both degrees in e-learning and M&S, Corey accepted a new opportunity with the Oracle Corporation as a curriculum and course developer. At the moment, he develops courseware materials based on Oracle’s products that are marketed and sold to Oracle’s enterprise customers worldwide. However, he was still interested in academic research and learning about cyberspace related topics such as network security, malware, and cryptography. Therefore, he applied to the Digital Forensics program offered at UCF. Corey’s interests grew to wanting to understand nomenclature and taxonomic classifications of malware and other forms of cyberlife. Besides studying cybersecurity, he also felt compelled to investigate deeper concepts of curriculum and instruction since he worked in the curriculum development field. By applying to the master program for curriculum and instruction and then being accepted, Corey believes that he will benefit from the studying of curriculum theory for integrating and incorporating into his daily efforts while at Oracle. He currently lives in Orlando, Florida. He enjoys running, playing basketball, travelling, and drinking all types of wine varietals.