Our people
Executive Team
Professor Debi Ashenden - Executive Director
Debi is Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at UNSW. She previously held the DST Group-University of Adelaide Joint Chair in Cyber Security. In addition, she is a Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK. Debi’s research interests are
in interdisciplinary approaches to solving complex cyber security problems – particularly in finding ways of ‘patching with people’ as well as technology. She is currently researching how to fuse behavioural science with cyber deception, the security implications of MLOps, and the socio-technical aspects of designing complex military systems.
Debi was previously Head of the Centre for Cyber Security at Cranfield University at the Defence Academy of the UK and was a member of the UK MOD’s Defence Science Expert Committee. She has worked extensively across the public and private sector for organisations such as UK MOD, GCHQ, Cabinet Office, Home Office, Euroclear, Prudential, Barclaycard, Reuters and Close Bros. She has had a number of articles on cyber security published, presented at a range of conferences and co-authored a book for Butterworth Heinemann, Risk Management for Computer Security: Protecting Your Network & Information Assets.
Professor Richard Buckland – Director Education
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
Professor Lyria Bennett Moses – Law & Justice
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 – Arts, Design & Architecture
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 Sushmita Ruj – Computer Science & Engineering
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 Benjamin Turnbull – UNSW Canberra
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
Adjunct Professor Marcus Thompson
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.
