Golden G. Richard III, an experimental computer scientist and the third in a line of Golden's now numbering four, was born in 1964 in Jennings, LA. Golden's primary research areas are in digital forensics, specifically, next-generation digital forensics tools, network security, and operating systems internals. Golden is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Orleans and director of the Networking, Security, and Systems Administration Laboratory (NSSAL). After Hurricane Katrina, he evacuated to Austin, TX, where he was a Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin during 2005-2006. Golden is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Digital Investigation, a member of the Secret Service Taskforce on Electronic Crime, and USENIX's Educational Liaison to the University of New Orleans. He is also GIAC-certified digital forensics investigator and co-founder of Digital Forensics Solutions, LLC, a private digital investigation firm.

Golden completed his undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of New Orleans and was the first student ever to graduate with honors in computer science at UNO. His undergraduate advisor was the late Howard Evans. After UNO, he ventured north to Ohio State and braved the midwestern cold for almost 6 years, earning M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science in 1991 and 1995, respectively. His Ph.D. advisor was Mukesh Singhal, who is now the Gartner Group Chair in Networking at the University of Kentucky. His Ph.D. dissertation was on process recovery mechanisms for message-passing and distributed shared memory systems.

Golden set a record still unbroken among his peers by sending forth a single job application after graduation, to the University of New Orleans, where he was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1994. Golden is a notorious food snob, regularly shunning foods whose recipes contain the words "packet" or "can". When he's not engaged in benevolent hacking or dumping his brain contents into Powerpoint slides, he can be found cooking, gardening, consuming music (generally, jazz, reggae, trip hop, blues, or punk), skateboarding, or sipping wine with friends.