A Year of Cybersecurity and Privacy at Georgia Tech

Almost a year after their first virtual meeting, the faculty and staff of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) met recently on the fifth floor of the Coda building in Tech Square to celebrate one year of education and research.  

In the fall of 2020, the Georgia Institute of Technology announced the establishment of its newest academic unit in 10 years. This new unit aligned the three master degree programs in the College of Computing, College of Engineering, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts to create an interdisciplinary school capable of tackling the evolving threats to cybersecurity and privacy.  

“I’m pleased and proud to see the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy developing into the world-class, cross-college school that so many have worked to make it,” said Charles Isbell, Dean of Computing and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair. “The future is even brighter, and I look forward to the new developments in leadership, research, and curriculum that are on the way.” 

The rise of regularly occurring cyberattacks contributed to the need to form the new school.  

“We were formed to solve a global problem,” said Rich DeMillo, SCP interim chair. “As more businesses are digitally transformed the ability of adversaries to hack into systems to cause damage, to cause chaos, and to steal things has become a global problem.” 

The cybersecurity and privacy research done by faculty across Georgia Tech has continued under SCP. Prior to the school’s establishment, the Institute for Information Security and Privacy (IISP) housed the Institute’s research faculty in this burgeoning domain.  

“In IISP there was a huge uptick in collaborative research within Georgia Tech in the cybersecurity space, particularly across multiple academic units,” said Wenke Lee, IISP executive director. “This momentum is continuing with SCP because we have faculty from multiple academic units within Georgia Tech as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute.”  

The School of Cybersecurity and Privacy currently employs 40 faculty members that continue to make advancements in research while training and educating the school’s graduate students. SCP has more than 60 students in its Ph.D. program, 500 students enrolled in a master’s program, and 650 students in the online master’s program.