Biometrics pioneer Stephanie Schuckers joins UNC Charlotte

When Stephanie Schuckers was working hard in her math and sciences classes as a young girl, inspired by her engineer father, she couldn’t have predicted that one day she’d be directing a renowned research center that helps governments and business titans solve their trickiest digital security issues.

Schuckers, a noted biometrics scholar, is now UNC Charlotte’s Bank of America Endowed Chair in Computer Science in the College of Computing and Informatics, a new position created to provide the resources needed to support a veteran researcher in the computing field.

“Joining this college was such an exciting opportunity,” Schuckers said. “Between the excellent students, dedicated staff and our accomplished faculty, there’s such a strong feeling of synergy and connection at UNC Charlotte.”

Schuckers earned her doctorate in electrical engineering under eminent biomedical signal processing scholar Janice Jenkins at the University of Michigan, before being hired to the faculty of West Virginia University, where she worked alongside CCI’s dean Bojan Cukic as fellow early career professors. Most recently, Schuckers served on the faculty of Clarkson University, where she rose to the position of the Paynter-Krigman Endowed Professor in Engineering Science in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Schuckers, a pioneer in biometrics, joined UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics at the start of the 2024-2025 academic year. Her field of speciality, biomedical signal and image processing, draws from both computing and electrical engineering to measure and decipher signals created by the human body. She’s especially interested in the dimension of “liveness” — measuring whether or not a given biometric signal like a face scan or a fingerprint is connected to a living, breathing individual — and its role as an important security layer. For this work, in 2023, Schuckers was named a Fellow by IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization.

In 2002, Schuckers, Cukic and colleagues founded the Center for Identification Technology Research, funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) as an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC). The center, now composed of dozens of researchers from universities around the world, has grown into an influential research hub for advanced biometrics and applications of machine learning and AI.

Major corporations and government agencies routinely partner with CITeR to fund innovative biometric research designed to solve unique problems related to interpreting biometric data, often with significant safety and cybersecurity implications. Current and past partners include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Qualcomm.

“We don’t just identify these problems — we solve them,” Schuckers said.

Along the way, Schuckers and colleagues founded NexID Biometrics, a private company working in the biometrics space. She and her fellow founders sold the company to industry leader Precise Biometrics in 2017, under whose banner it continues to operate. 

When the new endowed chair position at UNC Charlotte opened up, Schuckers found herself excited about the opportunity to once again partner with her former collaborator Dean Cukic, but was more than anything else thrilled about how UNC Charlotte’s size and the scope of its research endeavours would open up the door to meaningful collaborations in the future. She was also attracted to the position due to the fact that she would be able to teach and mentor students while continuing to devote her time to actively directing the CITeR center.

“I continue to be motivated by the research challenges of the cat-and-mouse game of security,” Schuckers said. “I love sharing the thrill of the hunt with students.”