Director - Ankur Chattopadhyay, Northern Kentucky University

  Dr. Ankur Chattopadhyay is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Cybersecurity in the School of Computing & Analytics (SCA) within the College of Informatics (COI) at Northern Kentucky University (NKU). Ankur is also the current Director of the NKU Center for Information Security within the NKU COI, and serves as the Point of Contact for NKU's National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education (NCAE-CDE) accreditation with NSA. He is currently the NKU PI/Lead on the Kentucky Coalition for Cybersecurity Educational Innovation – Cyber Workforce Development grant project in partnership with University of Louisville. He is the founder of the NSA/NSF GenCyber program at NKU, and was the first Program Director (PI) of the NSA/NSF GenCyber grant program at NKU, which is the only NCAE institution hosting and running a GenCyber program within the state of Kentucky. He is the founder and first faculty advisor of the NKU Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) chapter, that is the currently the only WiCyS student club within the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Ankur is a Research Faculty Fellow within the NKU Institute of Health Innovation. He has served as the Program Director/Coordinator of the NKU Bachelors in Cybersecurity major, and as the Program Coordinator of the undergraduate Teaching Assistantship (TA) program within NKU SCA. He has worked with NSA as the PI/Program Director for multiple GenCyber grant projects since 2017. Ankur teaches cybersecurity classes, like Data Privacy and Cybersecurity Risk Management, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels in NKU SCA.

Ankur earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS). He joined NKU in January 2020, and his research interests include visual privacy, authentication trust, cybersecurity & CS education, privacy-enhancing & inclusive visual surveillance, online healthcare information assurance, trustworthy AI, and psybersecurity. He loves working with undergraduate and graduate students, as well as involving them in his research plus teaching projects. He is also an Editorial Board Member with the IEEE Future Directions Newsletter in Technology, Policy and Ethics. He is an active professional member of IEEE and ACM. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed research publications, including conference papers, newsletter articles and journal papers. He has more than 15 years of work experience in both academics and industry.

Ankur is originally from Kolkata, India, where he did his Bachelors in Computer Engineering from the Institute of Engineering & Management (IEM). He was employed with Tata Consultancy Services, a global computer consultancy firm, for almost 7 years before he moved to academia. Before joining NKU, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay (UWGB), where he founded and directed the Center of Cybersecurity Education & Outreach. He was the principal investigator (PI) and the project director of the first-ever NSA/NSF GenCyber program in the state of Wisconsin at UWGB, where he led the GenCyber program for three years. He has also worked with Google and Microsoft as the PI/project lead for the Google IgniteCS plus Microsoft TechSpark grant programs at UWGB. As a scholar and educator, his passion is investigation of interdisciplinary cybersecurity research questions, and innovation of computer science & cybersecurity education. His industry profile includes multiple roles like IT Analyst, Software Engineer, and Embedded Systems Engineer.