Dr. Vrbsky is the Interim Department Head of Computer Science. She has been a member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alabma since 1992 and has served as the Cloud and Cluster Research Lab advisor. She has received support from the NSF, Department of Education, FAA, and the NHTSA (https://eng.ua.edu/eng-directory/dr-susan-vrbsky/). Dr. Vrbsky began her career in the social sciences when she discovered computer science.  She was able to combine her enjoyment of knowledge discovery through data with many areas of investigation in the dynamic field of computer science. 

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Representative Publications

1. Performance of Virtual Machines using Diskfull and Diskless Compute Nodes. M. Galloway, J. Robinson, S. Vrbsky, IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing 740-745, 2018.
2. Analysis of a TSP Solver with Multi-Swap Optimization on the GPU. J. Robinson, X. Hong, B. Eddy, S. Vrbsky. ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics 23:1-22, 2018.
3. Transaction Management with TBC in Cloud Databases. A. Islam, S. Vrbsky. International Journal of Cloud Computing 6:32-57, 2017.
4. Implementing Secure E-Mail on the Open Internet with MailTrust. M. Hudnall, S. Vrbsky, A. Parrish. IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security, Waltham, MA, April 2017.
5. FAPA: Flooding Attack Protection Architecture in a Cloud System. K. Zunnurhain, S. Vrbsky, R. Hasan. International Journal of Cloud Computing 3(4):379-401, 2014

Research Interests

Dr. Vrbsky’s research is in the areas of databases, data security, cloud computing, and biological databases.  She is interested in the challenges faced by biological databases, including quality assurance and security weaknesses in public biological repositories, and the interoperability and integration of heterogeneous data.  Under Dr. Vrbsky’s advisement, the research in the cloud and cluster computing lab has focused on low-cost solutions to ensure data consistency, protection from security attacks, vertical clouds and power aware load balancing strategies in clusters and clouds.