Dr. Ivan Garibay has over seventeen years of experience in the information technology sector combining industry and academic environments. He earned his PhD degree in Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, where he is currently the Director of the Office of Technology and Innovation, and Faculty at the Institute of Simulation and Training.
Dr. Garibay is a member of AAAI, AAAS, IEEE, ACM, Academy of Management and the American Economic Association and serves as a reviewer for multiple journals including Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Journal, the Evolutionary Computation Journal, the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and the Neural Networks Journal. He has also served as a reviewer for funding agencies including NSF and has co-chaired international and national conferences and workshops.

Dr. Garibay is currently serving as the founding director of the UCF Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory. His current research interests include agent-based economic and social systems modeling, complex adaptive systems, data analytics, network science, entrepreneurship and STEM education.

Dr. Garibay is actively participating in the creation of a new Master on Data Analytics program at UCF for which he will serve as the program director. He is also active in supporting technology entrepreneurship. He is the founding director of the NSF-funded UCF Innovation Corps program, and a member of the NSF Innovation Corps Faculty with 36 technology startup teams trained so far.