Alumni

Amel Attatfa, Abertay University
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Dr Amel Attatfa's PhD thesis explored the emerging field of cyber diplomacy, focusing on the potential development of cyber diplomacy for regulating cyberspace through the establishment of norms to facilitate multistakeholder behaviours. Cyber diplomacy is crucial for maintaining peace, security, and trust in cyberspace, considering its significance in countries' foreign policies and the interdisciplinary nature of the domain. With a deep understanding of both cybersecurity and diplomatic principles, Amel brings a unique perspective to the sociotechnical cybersecurity community. Her expertise in cyber diplomacy positions her as a rising star in the field, contributing valuable insights to discussions on international cooperation, conflict resolution, and cyber governance. Furthermore, her research addresses fundamental questions about the role of cyber diplomacy in mitigating cybersecurity challenges in the digital age, highlighting the need for integrating diplomatic and cyber considerations. Amel served as a Graduate School Representative for the School of Design and Informatics (SDI), a Postgraduate Research Student Representative at the Senate, and a member of the Security Research Group and Athena Swan Committee at Abertay University. She has also been a member of SPRITE+ and Graduate Women of Scotland (GWS), as well as a representative in the UK PhD Cyber Network. Her diverse experiences include speaking engagements, serving as a research panelist, symposium chair, forum moderator, reviewer, module tutor, seminar lead, and contributor to digital inclusion report. She has made significant contributions to the field of cyber diplomacy through her publications and is working on prospective projects in this area. As a RISCS Associate Fellow, Amel looks forward to contributing thought leadership to the RISCS community and helping shape the research agenda in alignment with her expertise in cyber diplomacy.

Nerida Brand, University of Exeter
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Nerida Brand is a PhD candidate at the Universities of Exeter and Cardiff. On completing a research placement with RISCS, supported and funded by the South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, Nerida was invited to be an Associate Fellow. Her research focuses on the human experience of digital technologies, particularly the balancing of information sharing with an understanding of cyber risk. She is primarily interested in how these issues are negotiated by vulnerable individuals, such as children and adolescents. Her work with RISCS will investigate how risk and digital responsibility can be communicated in age-appropriate terms, harnessing today’s youth’s unprecedented engagement with digital technologies.

Anna Cartwright, Oxford Brookes University
Former RISCS Senior Fellow

Bio to follow

Richard Cole, University of Bristol Former
RISCS Associate Fellow

Dr Richard Cole is a narratologist specialising in video games, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). He is interested in how different audiences engage with immersive media, and in particular the impact that immersive stories about the past and future can have, both imaginatively, and in terms of education. He currently co-directs the Bristol Digital Game Lab, which brings together researchers and practitioners from a radically diverse range of perspectives, with digital games as a shared object of interest. With RISCS, Richard is keen to explore the capacity that games might have for understanding cyber security issues, as well as for training purposes. He is also interested in how rapid advancements in AI might shape the way in which cyber security and risk is understood.

Alicia Cork, University of Bath
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Dr Alicia Cork completed her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Exeter in 2021. She now works as an interdisciplinary Research Associate at the University of Bath, where she collaborates with a number of diverse academics including psychologists, sociologists, computer/data scientists and behavioural scientists. Alicia’s research focuses on the conceptualisation of Online and Virtual Reality Harms and she is funded by the EPSRC’s National Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (REPHRAIN). She leads the research on four diverse projects which broadly aim to understand experiences and mitigations of current online harms, whilst also examining the future risks of novel technologies such as Virtual Reality. She has presented her work to various important stakeholders involved in the regulation of online technologies, including the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Metaverse and Web 3.0 technologies at the House of Lords, Ofcom and the NCA.

Partha Das Chowdhury, University of Bristol
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Dr Partha Das Chowdhury is a senior research associate at the National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (REPHRAIN) at the University of Bristol. Partha investigates the realism of the assumptions made while building systems. He takes interdisciplinary paths in his study. He leads the strand of research on REPHRAIN privacy testbed operating system to interrogate system design assumptions. He conceived and leads the strand of research to investigate the assumptions made by system designers about their users. He draws from theories of justice, social choice, and welfare economics to understand systematic exclusion in the digital world. To that end he was the first to propose Amartya Sen’s capability approach as a foundation to build protection mechanisms against online harms. These diverse strands aim to identify redressable manifest insecurities and exclusions. He was involved in the evaluation of six safety technologies to detect child sexually abusive material (CSAM) commissioned by GCHQ and the Home Office, UK. Partha was part of the scoping team for the £11 M node projects that were funded by REPHRAIN. He has published in New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW), Usenix PePR, IEEE SecDev, Security Protocols Workshop held annually at Cambridge, among others.

Andrew Dwyer, Royal Holloway, University of London
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Dr Andrew Dwyer is a Lecturer in Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, where his research is arranged across three themes: 1) Digital Decisions; 2) Contested (Geo)Political Economies of Cyber Policy; and 3) ‘Critical’ Approaches to Cyber Security. Andrew is Co-I on the EPSRC-funded project ‘Equitable Privacy’ and also leads the UK Offensive Cyber Working Group, examining the evolving practices of cyber operations by states.. Previously, he has been an Addison Wheeler Fellow at Durham University and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol after completing his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2019.

Jason Dymydiuk, University of Wolverhampton Former RISCS Associate Fellow Dr Jason Dymydiuk is a Lecturer in Contemporary Conflicts and Warfare at the University of Wolverhampton with a focus on intelligence and cyber. He is currently conducting research into AI metrics to improve government, industry, and public understanding of the potential risks of algorithms in technology including smart cities, control systems, surveillance, and weaponry. This is a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional project embedding socio-technical thought into the research. Previously, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research at Queen Mary University London (QMUL) as part of the National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (REPHRAIN) project Privacy Enhancing Technologies for Small and Medium Enterprises (PETs4SMEs). Working under the leadership of Dr Maria Bada (PI-QMUL), Dr Jason Nurse (University of Kent), and Dr Stephen Furnell (University of Nottingham) to produce a Privacy Starter Pack for SMEs. Prior to this, Jason worked as a Post-doctoral Research for RISCS Senior Fellow in Leadership and Culture Dr Ruth Massie (University of Cranfield) to produce an advisory report for middle management leadership in cyber security. Dr Dymydiuk received his PhD from the University of Warwick. He was subsequently awarded an Institute of Advance Study Early Career Fellowship from the University of Warwick to publish his article 'RUBICON and Revelation: the curious robustness of the ‘secret’ CIA-BND operation with Crypto AG' in the Journal Intelligence and National Security.

Julie Gore, Birkbeck, University of London
Former RISCS Senior Fellow

Thomas Groß, Newcastle University RISCS Senior Fellow

Thomas Groß is a Professor in System Security in the School of Computing at Newcastle University. He is the Director of Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence in Cyber Security & Resilience, a UK Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR). His primary research interests are in system security and privacy, where he is most active in applied cryptography, human factors and evidence-based methods of security and privacy. He was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant Confidentiality-Preserving Security Assurance (CASCAde). This research aims at achieving the certification and security assurance of system topologies and complex data structures in such a way that one can prove security properties to verifiers, without disclosing sensitive information. This research includes the creation of novel digital signature schemes, such as Monipoly, on graph data structures, called graph signature schemes, especially in a form that makes the signed graph elements (vertices, edges, and labels) available to zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge. He has also a strong interest in evidence-based methods in security and privacy as well as sound empirical research methodology. He will pursue this research agenda through his RISCS Fellowship. This research includes reviewing the evidence present in the field, evaluating reporting fidelity, statistical reliability, and meta-analyses. This research also involves the analysis of the validity and reliability of instruments in human dimensions of security and privacy research, incl. for example the well-known privacy concern scale IUIPC, and large-scale systematic analyses of human decision making, incl. for example in the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies.

Sophie James, Lancaster University
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Dr. Sophie James is a Lecturer in Security and Protection Science with the Department of Marketing at Lancaster University Management School. Her work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals including Marketing Theory, Consumption, Markets & Culture and Annals of Tourism Research. Sophie has been featured in various media outlets, including BBC Radio, ITV Granada, and The Big Issue (read her latest piece on toxic online subcultures here). Sophie's work relates to digital anthropology, providing important contextualisation for digital transformation, socio-digital futures, and security challenges. Her research strives to provide in-depth insights on how individuals and groups engage with web-based communication platforms for a variety of ideological reasons. Her work draws from theories on consumer identity-making and socio-historic patterning, exploring how uncanny, extreme, and/or insubordinate content on social media networks can erode trust in expert systems and have wider moral, ethical, social implications. Sophie is further interested in identifying the ideological deadlocks of dissident political opinions and how these may inform policy interventions on curbing the spread of disinformation.

Oishee Kundu, University of Bath
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Oishee Kundu is a Research Associate at Cardiff University, with expertise in public procurement and innovation. She has been associated with UKRI's Digital Security by Design initiative, working within Discribe Hub at the University of Bath on the question of adoption of cybersecurity technologies. She is also an aspiring storyteller and boardgame developer, fascinated by the power of stories and games in revealing deep-set assumptions and thus externalising knowledge. She enjoys creating immersive learning environments and building bridges between university research and the wider public and has actively participated in public engagement and knowledge exchange activities such as the ESRC Festival of Social Science, the Cheltenham Science Festival and CheltLitFest. Oishee has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics (Delhi University) and a Master’s degree in International Economic Policy (Sciences Po). Her Master’s dissertation on defence procurement challenges won the Defence Economics Award 2017 from the French Ministry of Armed Forces and the inaugural Prix Bastien Irondelle from AEGES France. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2021.

George Loukas, Greenwich, University of London
Former RISCS Senior Fellow

Maryam Mehrnezhad, Royal Holloway, University of London
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Dr Maryam Mehrnezhad is a Lecturer at the Information Security Group (ISG), RHUL. Before that, she was a Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, and a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich in 2022. She has a PhD in CS from NU (2013-16) where she was a Research Fellow too (2016-21). Maryam was the team leader and winner of the Kaspersky/Economist competition on blockchain for e-voting (2016), winner of best PhD research award, NCSC ACE-CSR (2016), and runner-up of Newcastle alumni achievement award (2018), John Karat usable privacy and security award, SOUPS (2016), and Google Anita Borg student award (2014). Maryam is interested in Security and Privacy Engineering topics where her research is informed by real-world problems. She works on emerging technologies by performing attacks (side-channel, fingerprinting, tracking) and designing solutions (e.g., sensor-based IoT authentication, and secure contactless payment). She works on usable security and privacy topics by conducting system and user studies across platforms (web, mobile, IoT) and demography (gender, nationality, age). Maryam is particularly interested in the complex risks and harms concerning Minority and Minoritized users. She is the PI of an EPSRC PETRAS grant: CyFer (cybersecurity, privacy, trust, and bias in FemTech), and Co-I of a UKRI grant: AGENCY (Assuring citizen agency in a world with complex online harms).

Emma Moreton, University of Liverpool
Former RISCS Fellow

Rebecca Owens, Newcastle University
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Rebecca Owens is a Legal Research Associate at Newcastle University, working on the AGENCY project (Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms). In which she collaborates with a cross-disciplinary team to design responsible technology that enhances citizen empowerment. Her research also spearheads the development of innovative policy frameworks that integrate core principles like trust, privacy, safety, and security throughout the entire digital technology lifecycle, from design to implementation. Rebecca’s PhD was fully funded by the Sir Joseph Rotblat Alumni Scholarship from the University of Liverpool, along with an FFWG grant. She also holds a master's degree from the University of Liverpool, fully funded by the John Lennon Memorial Scholarship, and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the same University. Through her fellowship with RISCS, Rebecca is excited to explore how policy can be used holistically to empower the citizen-centric design of emerging technologies.

Bianca Slocombe, Coventry University
Former RISCS Associate Fellow

Bianca Slocombe is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Peace and Security at Coventry University, working within the Protective Security Lab. She began this position in July 2020 after completing her Master of Research and PhD in Psychology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral research focused on the mitigation of violent action in the name of sacred values. Since then, she has been utilising her expertise in psychology and behavioural science across the field of security, including projects for the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) and the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO). Bianca has expertise in experimental and statistical methods and is particularly interested in working in interdisciplinary teams to address complex questions.

Will Slocombe, University of Liverpool
Former RISCS Senior Fellow

Matt Spencer, University of Warwick
Former RISCS Senior Fellow

Matt's research sits at the interdisciplinary intersection of Science & Technology Studies and Cyber Security. Most broadly, he is interested in understanding the relations between digital technologies, knowledge practices, and society. He works primarily with qualitative materials, including interviews, workshops and texts. His research in recent years has been devoted to developing a sociocultural analysis of cyber security, focused in particular on exploring the kinds of reasoning and justification applied to digital infrastructures as targets of real (or hypothetical) attack. Topics he has worked on include:

• the changing face of cyber security assurance policy and the role of government in creating schemes for the evaluation of the security of technical products;
• the emergence of new security models, in particular the rise of 'de-perimeterised' ways of thinking in information security;
• the use of models and modelling in security reasoning more generally;
• the nature of vulnerability as it emerges in cycles of revelation and repair;
• the problematisation of security as an organisational function within the context of software delivery, and new ways of thinking about secure delivery informed by lean and high reliability theory.

Across these areas, he returns to a number of core themes, including the historicity of technology and of the forms of reasoning entwined with it, as well as the importance of 'sensemaking,' how the stories practitioners tell about securing inform their work. As an anthropologist by training, he regards participation in this field of study to be a key component of his research practice. His own 'security practice' in this vein includes contributions to cyber security guidance and specialist threat reports, as well as the development of applied workshop methodologies for the benefit of security practitioners – see the Trust Mapping workshop methodology.