Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. I Distinguished Professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) since September 2010. She has unique experience working in the commercial industry, federal research laboratory, US government and academia, and her 30+ year career includes research and development, technology transfer, product development, program management, and consulting to the federal government. Dr. Thuraisingham joined UTD in October 2004 as a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Cyber Security Research Center which conducts research in data security and privacy, secure systems, secure networks, secure languages, secure social media, data mining and semantic web. She is an elected Fellow of several prestigious organizations including the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2002), the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2003), the BCS (British Computer Society, 2005), and the SPDS (Society for Design and Process Science - a society that promotes transdisciplinary research - 2011). She is the recipient of numerous awards including (i) the IEEE Computer Society's 1997 Technical Achievement Award for outstanding and innovative contributions to secure data management, (ii) the 2010 Research Leadership Award for Outstanding and Sustained Leadership Contributions to the Field of Intelligence and Security Informatics presented jointly by the IEEE Intelligent and Transportation Systems Society and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (iii) the 2010 ACM SIGSAC (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control) Outstanding Contributions Award for seminal research contributions and leadership in data and applications security for over 25 years and (iv) the 2011 AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association) Medal of Merit for Sus
