Some top university-based cybersecurity researchers include Kathleen M. Carley at Carnegie Mellon, known for her work in social network analysis and AI for security, and David Bader at Georgia Tech, an expert in data science and computational social science applied to cybersecurity.

Other notable researchers include Bhavani Thuraisingham at the University of Texas at Dallas, a leader in the field of data and information security, and Dawn Song at UC Berkeley, recognized for her contributions to computer security and systems.

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

Source: Website

Duminda Wijesekera is a professor in the Cyber Security Engineering Department at George Mason University. He was the inaugural chairman of the Cyber Security Engineering Department until December 2022, and a visiting research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) between 2007-2022. He leads the Mason Innovation Laboratory at Mason Square. He is also a fellow at the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies.

His current research addresses multiple areas. The first is the security and safety of cyber-physical systems. Research in this area includes the safety and security of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that include trains, aircraft, and connected/automated automobiles. Another area is digital forensics. Research in digital forensics includes creating potential scenario from evidence and creating frameworks for argumentations, error management of forensic data, and adding odds ratio between different scenarios that fit the evidence. A third area is applying formal methods to CPS safety and security.

Source: Webpage

Sushil Jajodia is a University Professor, BDM International Professor, and the founding director of the Center for Secure Information Systems in the College of Engineering and Computing. He is also the founding site director of the NSF IUCRC Center for Configuration Analytics and Automation at Mason. His research interests include security, privacy, databases, and distributed systems. His current research sponsors are the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO), the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), The U.S. National Security Administration (NSA), The National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Northrop Grumman, and The MITRE Corporation.

He was recognized for the most accepted papers at the 30th anniversary of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. His h-index is 86 and Erdös number is 2; both indicate a broad citation in scholarly publishing. He is the founding consulting editor of the Springer International Series on Advances in Information Security and SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. He has served in different capacities for various journals and conferences. Sushil Jajodia has supervised 27 doctoral dissertations.

Source: GMU webpage