Our leadership

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Executive Team

Sanjay K. Jha is a full Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney since 2006. His current research focuses on Cybersecurity. Sanjay has published over 300 articles in high quality journals and conferences. He has been very active in attracting ARC Discovery and linkage grants, CRC and other industry. He leads UNSW's participation in the cooperative research centre for cybersecurity CSCRC. He is interested in research at the intersection of networking, both wired and wireless and application security using Machine learning. He was an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). He has been a member of technical program committee of the ACM WiSec 2014 and ACM CCS'2014/19, Codaspy20/21 security conferences. 

Professor Richard Buckland is the Director of First Year Experience of UNSW.

Richard is Professor in CyberCrime Cyberwar and Cyberterror at the School of Computer Science and Engineering UNSW, Visiting Professor in Educational Design at the National University of Malaysia UKM, and Grand Challenge Visiting Professor in CyberSecurity at Taylors University.

Faculty leads

Lyria Bennett Moses is Director of the Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation and a Professor and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Law and Justice at UNSW Sydney. She is also co-lead of the Law and Policy theme in the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre and Deputy Director, Law and Justice in the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security.

Lyria's research explores issues around the relationship between technology and law, including the types of legal issues that arise as technology changes, how these issues are addressed in Australia and other jurisdictions, and the problems of treating “technology” as an object of regulation. Recently, she has been working on legal and policy issues associated with the use of artificial intelligence, and the appropriate legal framework for enhancing cyber security. She is on the NSW Information and Privacy Advisory Committee, the Executive Committee of the Australian Chapter of the IEEE’s Society for the Social Implications of Technology, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.

Dr Teresa Crea is a narrative and simulation researcher, a writer|director and an academic passionate about emerging technologies and how they are impacting our narrative understandings from a neuroscientific perspective.

Her work in the field of simulation has included a range of industry collaborations with the defence sector on narrative sensemaking and information processing in immersive environments and pilot studies with the Simulation Unit at the Department of Anaesthesia, Royal Adelaide Hospital. Teresa has acquired broad multi sector knowledge of simulation and immersive environments through her industry networks and she continues to foster industry and academic partnerships to design solutions for a better future. 

She obtained her Doctoral Degree from UTS Sydney, winning the UTS Chancellor's Award and is currently the Program Lead for the Master of Simulation and Immersive Technologies in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Dr Rob Nicholls is an associate professor in regulation and governance at the UNSW Business School and a visiting professional fellow at UTS Sydney Law. His research interests focus on competition law, the regulation of networked and platform industries with an emphasis on the effects of technology in the regulatory space. Rob has had a thirty-year career concentrating on competition, regulation and governance. His first degree was in electronics and communications engineering from the University of Birmingham, and he was awarded his PhD and MA by UNSW Sydney.

Rob is director of the UNSW Business School Regulatory Laboratory, a deputy director of the UNSW Institute for Cybersecurity, and a member of the UNSW Business Insights Institute.

Before moving to academia, he worked for Webb Henderson, the ACCC and spent twelve years as a client-facing consultant at Gilbert + Tobin, including as a partner. Rob is an accredited mediator.

Scott Sisson is Professor of Statistics at UNSW Sydney, and founding Director of the UNSW Data Science Hub.

His research explores theory and methods development in Bayesian and computational statistics, statistical data science, machine learning, extreme value theory, and the use of these methods in a wide range of applications.

Scott is a former President of the Statistical Society of Australia, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, and a recent ARC Future Fellow. He sits on the Methodology Advisory Committee of the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Scott has been recognised for his research by the Australian Academy of Science, receiving the 2011 P. A. P. Moran Medal. He is the lead editor of The Handbook of Approximate Bayesian Computation (CRC Press, 2018).

Dr Sushmita Ruj is Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, Sydney. Her research interests are in applied cryptography, post quantum cryptography, blockchains and privacy enhancing technologies. She designs practical, efficient, and provably secure protocols that can be deployed in real-world applications. She explores security and privacy issues in cloud, smart grids, and data sharing platforms. She has extensively worked on cryptographic key distribution, identity and access management, secure cloud storage, search/analytics on encrypted data and blockchain security, privacy and scalability.

She has won several competitive grants like Samsung GRO Award, NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Cisco Academic Grant and IBM Research grant. She is an Associate Editor of the Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Elsevier Journal on Information Security and Applications (JISA) and Elsevier Journal on Pervasive and Mobile computing (PMC). She served as a Program Co-Chair of ACISP 2021 and Indocrypt 2019.  She served as a working group member of The National Blockchain Roadmap of Australia and a working group member of the First Blockchain initiative by Reserve Bank of India.

Before joining UNSW, she was a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61, an Associate Professor at Indian Statistical Institute and an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Indore. She held positions in Lund University, Sweden and University of Ottawa, Canada.

Sushmita is a senior member of both ACM and IEEE.

Associate Professor Ben Turnbull is a researcher and practitioner working in the Digital Forensics, Cyber Security, Knowledge Representation and Visual Analytics domains. His research interests include novel approaches to securing computers and networks, automated learning from large datasets, forensic analysis of non-traditional devices, cyber security, cyber situation awareness, knowledge management, network analysis and visual analytics. Ben believes in real-world research that helps the community at large, and implementation is a large part of this. Additionally, he also work with the US Naval Research Laboratory, conducting research on the Tor network.

His research goal is to provide comprehensive situation understanding and decision support for all areas integrating cyber systems. As part of this, Ben's research the nexus of cyber security and kinetic effect to understand the true impacts of cyber-attack, best-practice automated analysis and visual techniques to aid decision support. 

Visiting Fellows

Professor Marcus Thompson holds an adjunct position in the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security and is a retired Major General who served 34 years in the Australian Army.  Graduating from the Royal Military College in 1988, Marcus was allocated to the Royal Australian Corps of Signals. He served in a variety of command, regimental and Special Operations appointments including: Command of the 3rd Combat Signal Regiment; secondment to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as the Senior Advisor Defence Policy and Operations; Director General Special Operations Capability; Commander 6th Brigade; and deployments to East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His final appointment was as the inaugural Head of Information Warfare for the Australian Defence Force.

Marcus holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering with honours from the University of New South Wales, a Bachelor of Business from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, a Master of Defence Studies from the University of Canberra, a Master of Strategic Studies from Deakin University, and a PhD in Cyber Security from the University of New South Wales. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2014 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Since leaving the Australian Army, Marcus has founded Cyber Compass Pty Ltd, an independent advisory focused on improving cyber security and developing sovereign Australian capability.  He has worked with and supported several Australian entities, including Macquarie Telecom Group, NAB, Macquarie Bank, and the Melbourne Business School. He is the Chair of the Board of Penten, the Chair of the Board of ParaFlare, and a Non-Executive Director of Bank Australia.

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