Damian Villarreal
MSCS @ UTRGV
I like cybersecurity, AI research, and building useful things.
Bio
In my free time, I like to study, spend time at the park, and listen to music.
Experience
RSOC Student Analyst Lead
Sep 2024 – Present
UTRGV Regional Security Operations Center
Detection & response, threat hunting, and leading student analysts managing 20,000+ endpoints.
Founder & Executive Director
Jan 2026 – Present
Vaquero Information Security Initiative
Founded UTRGV's cybersecurity nonprofit and student SOC lab; 100+ members.
Student Research Intern
Jun 2023 – Aug 2023
UTRGV
AI/ML research under a published professor; completed a paper on machine learning systems.
Student Academic Tutor
Sep 2023 – Dec 2023
UTRGV
In-person instruction for 100+ Calculus I students.
Projects
Zero-Trust IoT Security Framework
Blockchain-backed IoT architecture with post-quantum crypto and ML anomaly detection (~397 TPS).
SOAR-EDR Automation Pipeline
Tines + LimaCharlie pipeline for LLM-augmented machine-speed triage and enrichment.
ChipNeMo DAPT Pipeline
Reproduced NVIDIA's domain-adaptive pre-training pipeline for Llama 2 7B.
AWS Cloud Security Monitoring
Terraform-provisioned Wazuh agents on EC2 with Tailscale for secure home-manager connectivity.
CivicWatch
1st place hackathon project for the Social Good and ML/AI track.