Rishikesh Sahay is an Assistant professor at University of Illinois, Springfield in the USA. He is a certified IEC/ISA 62443 Cyber Risk Assessment Specialist. Before moving to academia in the US, he has worked in industry with companies like Orsted and MAN Energy Solutions as a cybersecurity specialist in Denmark. There he has worked in cyber risk assessment & mitigation and compliance according to the IEC 62443 cybersecurity and NERC-CIP. He did his Postdoctoral research at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). At the DTU, he developed a cyber risk assessment framework for critical infrastructures. He also serves as voting member in the International Society of Automation (ISA) in setting the cybersecurity standard for critical infrastructures.

He did his PhD from Sorbonne University in France in 2017. His PhD thesis was focused on autonomic cyber defense using software-defined networking.

His research interests include Cyber risk assessment & mitigation, malware analysis, vulnerability scanning, autonomic cyber defense, policy-based network management, software-defined networking, and cyber resilience. Specifically, he is focused on cybersecurity of critical infrastructures such as smart grid, maritime, aviation, among others. 

He has collaborated on research projects with companies like Maersk, Atos, IBM Research Zurich and also with Universities like University of Tokyo, NAIST, Technical University of Darmstadt among many others. He has published research papers and book chapters in top ranked journals and conferences.

You don't learn from successes; you don't learn from awards; you don't learn from celebrity; you only learn from wounds and scars and mistakes and failures. And that's the truth - Jane Fonda