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.

I am a Professor and the Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology at George Mason University, and I serve as the Executive Director of the Institute for Digital Innovation (IDIA) and the Director of the Center for Infrastructure Security in the Era of AI (ISEAI). I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2005 from the University of Naples Federico II. In 2011, I joined George Mason University after serving as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My research interests are in the area of Information and Network Security, with a particular emphasis on Modeling and Detection of Cyber Attacks, Cyber Situational Awareness, Network Hardening, Moving Target Defense, Configuration Security, and Vulnerability Metrics. I have participated in sponsored projects totaling $13M, with my personal share amounting to $3.5M. I hold six U.S. patents and have co-authored two books as well as over 90 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. In 2014, I was honored as one of the three recipients of the Mason Emerging Researcher/Scholar/Creator Award, one of the most prestigious honors at Mason.

I have served on the technical program committee of numerous conferences and am a member of the Editorial Board of Springer International Journal of Information Security, Elsevier Co

Source: Website

Alexandre Barreto is an Associate Professor, Department of Cyber Security Engineering at George Mason University.

He has applied his significant experience as an air traffic and air defense infrastructure manager to a career specializing in the field of cybersecurity and networking, which in conjunction with his research on cyber impact assessment, has led to applications in cyber and transportation security, and decision support systems in defense and critical infrastructure areas. These topics are at the core of his classroom activities at both graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as his research path.

Barreto is a researcher in impact assessment and secure air transportation protocols and developed innovative applications and extensions that aid in the fight against cyber-warfare. He received his MS and PhD from Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica in Brazil.

Source: GMU CEC Page

Paulo Costa has applied his significant experience as a fighter pilot to a career specializing in the field of electronic warfare and flight safety, which in conjunction with his research on probabilistic reasoning has led to applications in cyber and transportation security, heterogeneous data fusion, and decision support systems in healthcare, defense, and other areas. These topics are at the core of his classroom activities at both graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as his research path. Costa leads the research of graduate-level students in understanding security objectives and verification protocols, bringing in the science of probabilistic reasoning and challenging PhD-level candidates to consider theory and methods for building computationally efficient software agents that reason, act, and learn in environments characterized by noisy and chaotic traffic.

Costa is a key researcher in the field of probabilistic ontologies and has developed innovative applications and extensions that aid in the fight against cyber-warfare. In addition to his Mason assignments as Chair of the Cyber Security Engineering Department and Director of the C5I Center, Dr. Costa is Vice President for Securing Automation and Supply Chain Security (cymanii.org). He is a former President and current elected member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Information Fusion (isif.org), as well as an IEEE Senior Member (SM13).

Degrees

• PhD, Information Technology, George Mason University
• MS, Systems Engineering, George Mason University
• BS, Engineering, Brazilian Air Force Academy

Source: CEC Page

A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, Cummings was one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots. She is now the director of Mason’s Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC) and a professor at George Mason University. She holds faculty appointments in the Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science departments. She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow and recently served as the senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Cummings received her BS in Mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1988, her MS in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004.

Source: GMU webpage

Mohamed Gebril is an associate professor in the Cyber Security Engineering department. He joined Mason after working as a primary patent examiner for the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In his seven years at USPTO, he was involved in patent examination and prosecution areas in the data storage and networking fields, where he worked in intellectual property matters directed to computer security, enterprise network security and authentication, databases, data processing, and memory storage devices.

Gebril completed his PhD in electrical engineering at North Carolina A&T State University in 2011 in the area of big data indexing, machine learning, and AI applications. He received his MS in electrical engineering from North Carolina A&T State University in May 2008 in the area of robotics navigation and optimization and completed his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering at Alexandria University, Egypt.

Source: CEC 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

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

Mingkui Wei is an associate professor in the Department of Cyber Security Engineering. His current research interests focus on network security, especially on the application layer. He takes approaches including mathematical modeling and analysis, simulation and experiment, and machine learning, to identify and address security threats on the Internet.

His research results have been published in top-tier venues including IEEE INFOCOM, Usenix Security, and ACM CCS. He was a faculty in Computer Science at Sam Houston State University before joining Mason in 2021.

Degrees

• PhD, Computing Engineering, North Carolina State University, 2016
• MS, Information Systems, Southeast University (China), 2008

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