World scholar to run new UTSA cyber-security institute

By David Gabler
Assistant Vice President for Communications

(March 27, 2007)--Officials at The University of Texas at San Antonio announced Monday the appointment of an internationally recognized expert on information assurance and security to the faculty at UTSA.

The faculty appointment and creation of a research institute are supported by a $3.5 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF), an initiative created by Gov. Rick Perry to support new industry and educational initiatives in the state.

Ravi S. Sandhu will join the UTSA faculty June 1 as the Lutcher Brown Chair in Computer Science. One of the most frequently cited experts in the field of cyber security, he also will serve as founding executive director and chief scientist of the UTSA Institute for Cyber Security Research (ICSR).

The ICSR mission is to combine world-class research with commercialization, focusing on the protection of the nation's critical cyber infrastructure.

Expanding on the cyber-security work already underway at UTSA, the institute will partner with local, national, and international scientists and engineers to forge some of the foremost research programs in the world, bringing new ideas, technologies and economic opportunities to San Antonio and the state.

"With the tremendous support of Gov. Perry and the Emerging Technology Fund, UTSA will be able to expand critical research in cyber security and build a multidimensional institute to meet the challenges that face our country's technology infrastructure," said UTSA President Ricardo Romo. "Opportunities such as this help move UTSA to the forefront of research and innovation."

"This grant is exactly what ETF legislation was created to do," said David Spencer, president of Mandlebrot Ventures Inc. and chairman of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund Advisory Board. "With this grant and the recruitment of scientists such as Sandhu, UTSA will combine world-class research in cyber security with commercialization of that research."

Sandhu currently is a professor of information security and assurance at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and chief scientist and co-founder of TriCipher, a corporation that markets software to protect businesses and their customers from online fraud.

A fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Sandhu was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Information and System Security. He has authored more than 160 research papers on information security and his seminal work on role-based access control has been incorporated into standards for the National Institute of Standards and Technology-American National Standards Institute (NIST-ANSI) and a soon-to-be International Organization for Standardization (ISO) model.

He earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institutes of Technology in Bombay and Delhi, respectively, and an additional master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from Rutgers University.

UTSA is one of the premier institutions of higher education in South Texas and one of the fastest growing universities in the state. One of nine academic universities and six health institutions that comprise the UT System, UTSA is the second largest institution in the system. Celebrating its 37th anniversary, UTSA serves more than 28,300 students enrolled in 62 bachelor's, 43 master's and 20 doctoral degree programs.