PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas (February 24, 2023) — Prairie View A&M University is set to make a significant impact in the world of cybersecurity with the award of a $1 million research grant from the National Science Foundation Research, Internships, Scholarship and Engagement (RISE) program. The grant is intended to fund the development of a graduate research and educational program that will address the issue of security in the emerging smart networked society and the nation’s critical infrastructures (energy, financial, health, education, transportation, military/defense systems).
The proposed project will establish research programs in several niche areas, such as systems security, hardware security, and Internet of Things (IoT) security, in collaboration with industry partners. It will also develop a lecture and seminar series to provide students with a solid research background and understanding of cybersecurity challenges across the whole stack of computing systems, from low-level hardware to high-level software.
Annamalai Annamalai, Ph.D., professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
“The combination of research in collaboration with leading experts across the nation, high-quality teaching content, and assisted teaching will ensure the success of this important program,” said PVAMU Vice President of Research & Innovation Magesh Rajan, Ph.D., P.E., MBA. “The University looks forward to producing the next generation of cybersecurity experts’ thanks, partly, to this award.”
The project aims to increase the production of highly qualified doctoral graduates from underrepresented minority groups in a rapidly growing field by establishing pathways to Electrical and Systems Engineering (ECE) doctoral programs via an aggressive outreach plan to the Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC) member institutions, a network consisting of 20 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-serving institutions (MSIs).
Led by Annamalai Annamalai, Ph.D., Professor and Interim Department Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at PVAMU, the project also includes several collaborators from the Center of Excellence in Cybersecurity Research and Education (SECURE): Mohamed Chouikha,Ph.D., Executive Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chief Scientist & Executive Director of SECURE, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Ahmed Ahmed, Ph.D., as Co-PIs. Beverly Sande, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Marketing and Communications Department at PVAMU, will serve as the Project Evaluator.
The project also aims to develop a THECB (Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board) approved graduate certificate program in cybersecurity through curriculum enhancement initiatives. This initiative will complement the major capacity-building efforts already in place at PVAMU, aimed at establishing cybersecurity as one of its focus research areas.
According to Dr. Annamalai, who is also the Associate Director of SECURE, this project will train a new class of experts with vertical knowledge across the whole system design stack, including hardware, operating system, firmware, and software which is a critical step for the development of a new paradigm to securing networked smart systems with the ever-evolving attack surfaces.
Student recruitment will not be limited to PVAMU alone but will also be from the broader group of HBCUs, specifically from the Inclusive Engineering Consortium member institutions that do not have a Ph.D. program in cybersecurity or related fields. Through efficient recruitment, training, evaluation, and improvement, the program aims at recruiting minority students and training of four Ph.D./MS students yearly as Graduate Research Assistants and another four undergraduates as Undergraduate Research Assistants at PVAMU.
Equipped with the knowledge and skills to develop novel and efficient cybersecurity mechanisms to secure assets in the fields of embedded systems, IoT, supervisory control, and data access, as well as high-performance computing systems — PVAMU will be fundamental to developing cutting-edge cybersecurity technology. The project’s success will have broader impacts on the cybersecurity industry, boosting the further training of personnel in the cybersecurity field and addressing the great shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals nationwide.
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By Jenna Craig