"I'm not only honored but surprised that out of all the other Navy and Marine Corps students competing for this prestigious award, I was selected by Monterey's Navy League Council," said Sharpe, who was joined by his wife Alison and baby daughter Joanne in the audience.

Sharpe is recognized for his thesis work in "Applications in Probabilistic Combiners," which investigates the modification of encryption and decryption of data streams that result in output strings with a drastic increase in complexity.

"Cryptography forms the backbone of modern secure communications … Each method of encryption and decryption has its advantages and disadvantages if communicating parties require speed of encryption more than incredibly robust security," explained Sharpe.

Sharpe's use of linear feedback shift registers and two specially-designed combiners provided exceedingly robust randomness for secure communications output. His tests even passed stringent randomness tests required by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for pseudorandom numbers.

Sharpe is a native of San Jose, Calif., just 65-miles from NPS. He graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Operations Research. Earning his master's in Applied Mathematics from NPS' Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, he's ready to use his newly-honed skills in both mathematics and operations research in his next assignment.

"I'll be assigned to Atlantic Area Headquarters in Portsmouth, Virginia, where I'll be working with various data sets as an operations research analyst, so the degree I've earned at NPS will certainly be put to good use immediately," added Sharpe.