Our people

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 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.