Workshop for Women in Cybersecurity Research (CyberW)

short bios of panelists

Panelist: Bhavani Thuraisingham (UT Dallas)

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and the Executive Director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also a visiting Senior Research Fellow at Kings College, University of London and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and the AAAS. She has received several awards including the IEEE CS 1997 Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIGSAC 2010 Outstanding Contributions Award, and the ACM SACMAT 10 Year Test of Time Award. She has worked in industry (Honeywell), federal laboratory (MITRE), US government (NSF) and her work has resulted in 120 journal articles, 250 conference papers, 130 keynote and featured addresses, six US patents, fifteen books as well as technology transfer. She received her PhD from the University of Wales, Swansea, UK, and the prestigious earned higher doctorate (D. Eng) from the University of Bristol, UK.

Panelist: Hui Wendy Wang (Stevens Institute of Technology)

Dr. Hui (wendy) Wang is an associate professor of Computer Science Department of the Stevens Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests lie on database management and data mining in general, with particular focus on database security and data privacy. She was awarded NSF CAREER award in 2014 for her research in verifiable computations in cloud computing.

Panelist: Smriti Bhatt (Texas A&M)

Dr. Smriti Bhatt is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computing and Cyber Security at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. Dr. Bhatt is teaching cybersecurity and computer science courses in the department. She has received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio and did her doctoral research at the Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) and Center for Security and Privacy Enhanced Cloud Computing (C-SPECC). Dr. Bhatt’s research expertise is in the field of Cyber Security, mainly focused on Access Control and Communication Control models, and Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT). Her current research projects focus on developing secure access control and communication control models for Cloud-Enabled Internet of Things architecture applicable to various IoT domains, such as Smart Home, Smart Health, and Wearable IoT.

Panelist: Anna Squicciarini (Penn State University).

Dr. Anna Squicciarini is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at the Pennsylvania State Univeristy. She received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Milan. Her PhD thesis focused on Trust Negotiations, an access control model to enable trust between two unknown entities. Her main research interests are in the area of data security and privacy, with emphasis on access control mechanisms. Her work has been funded by industry and various funding agencies, including grants from the National Science Foundation (and a CAREER Award, 2015), Air Force, and Army Resarch Office. She also received some generous support from Google and Hewlett-Packard Research Labs. She published more than 70 contributions as papers in international conferences and journals, and chapters in international books. She won a couple of best paper awards (in 2011) at ACM Hypertext and (in 2012) at IEEE Passat. From 2012 to 2016, She was the PNC Career Development Professor in the College of IST.