Fellowship Awardees for 2024
1. Dr. Ashraf Tantavy is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Informatics, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, USA. Prior to joining DMU, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), VA, USA. Prior to VCU, he worked in the Oil & Gas industry for multinational organisations, including British Petroleum, Qatar Gas, and Schneider Electric, where he designed and implemented a variety of embedded systems including distributed control systems, SCADA systems, and safety instrumented systems. His research interests are at the intersection of Cyber Physical Systems, Artificial Intelligence, and Cyber Security to develop resilient AI-enabled autonomous cyber physical systems. His current research focuses on the development of AI agents for protection and security testing of autonomous cyber physical systems. His research application domains include industrial control systems, smart cities, transportation systems, and autonomous vehicles. In this fellowship, he is developing a roadmap for technologies, solutions, and processes to enable runtime security assurance for cyber physical systems. He is a certified Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) Expert from the International Society of Automation (ISA), NC, USA. He is a member of the IEEE.
2. Ric is a Senior Security Researcher at Orange Cyberdefense and an Honorary Researcher at Lancaster University. Where he obtained his PhD in computer science. His research involves a pragmatic and practically applicable approach to both offensive and defensive elements of cyber security, with a focus on operational technology, critical national infrastructure, novel attach techniques and quantitative cyber risk assessment.
3. Dr Neetesh Saxena is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University, United Kingdom (UK) and the Director & Lead of the Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security (CyCIS) Research Lab.
His research focuses on Cyber-Physical Systems Security (Smart Grid, EVs/CAVs, etc.), Cellular Network and SMS Security, and IoT Security. Before this, he had professional appointments with Bournemouth University (UK), Georgia Institute of Technology (USA), Stony Brook University (USA) and SUNY (South Korea). He was also a DAAD Scholar at B-IT, Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität, Bonn (Germany), a TCS Scholar (India), and the GW4 Crucible Future Research Leader (UK).
Dr Saxena is the Vice Chair – Data Analytics SIG, IEEE UK & Ireland Systems, and an Academic Advisor Panel Member for the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC) in the UK. He has been a draft committee member for the IEEE Standards. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the ACM and Eta Kappa Nu.
Neetesh’s current research explores security and the impact of cyber-physical assets.