Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham

The University of Texas System supports the professorship.

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“My goal has been to solve challenging research problems of national significance, which is why I got into cybersecurity. After spending many years in the industry and at the National Science Foundation, I felt that UT Dallas was the ideal place where I could continue to contribute to our national security.”

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is a leading expert in integrating cybersecurity with artificial intelligence and data science.

Before joining UT Dallas in 2004, Thuraisingham worked in the commercial industry, in a federal research lab and for the U.S. government. She began her career in cybersecurity at Honeywell International Inc. in the 1980s and later worked at The MITRE Corp., a nonprofit organization that works in the public interest across federal, state and local governments.

Thuraisingham was the first to prove that the general inference problem in secure database systems, in which it is possible to infer highly sensitive information from unclassified data, was unsolvable. As a result, she designed and developed methods to prevent or minimize unauthorized inferences. The National Security Agency commended her work in 1990.

Thuraisingham was among the first to discuss privacy violations that could occur due to data mining at a keynote address she gave at the 1996 International Federation for Information Processing Database Security Conference.

After 9/11, Thuraisingham joined the National Science Foundation (NSF) for three years and started research programs in data security, participated in data-mining initiatives for counterterrorism and gave featured addresses at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and at the United Nations.

Thuraisingham has written 15 books on data security and data science, more than 130 journal articles and more than 300 conference papers. She holds seven patents. She has also delivered more than 180 keynote/featured addresses and participated in over 100 panels. She has been named a fellow of several technology organizations, including the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and the British Computer Society (BCS).

Thuraisingham has received prestigious awards from IEEE, ACM and other professional organizations, as well as the Dallas Business Journal’s 2017 Women in Technology Award. Other honors include the IEEE Computer Society’s 1997 Technical Achievement Award; IEEE Communications Society 2019 Communications and Information Security Technical Committee Technical Recognition Award; IEEE Computer Society 2017 Technical Committee on Services Computing Research Innovation Award; the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) 2010 Outstanding Contributions Award, ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy 2017 Lasting Research Award; and the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies Test-of-Time Awards in 2018 and 2019.

As founder and executive director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute, Thuraisingham developed a team of members in cybersecurity research and education across multiple schools at UT Dallas that has generated more than $65 million in research funding and more than $15 million in education funding.

“I have worked steadily throughout my years at UT Dallas to add talented faculty to our institute and new classes and certifications in cybersecurity,” Thuraisingham said. “Our faculty whom we hired as assistant professors have also received several prestigious awards, and I am expecting them to receive many more such awards. I believe that their career success has been my most important achievement, as they are the future of UT Dallas.”

Thuraisingham earned her bachelor’s in pure mathematics, applied mathematics and physics from the University of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); a master’s degree in mathematical logic and foundations of computer science from the University of Bristol, England; and a PhD in theory of computation and computability theory from Swansea University in Wales. She also received an earned higher doctorate (Doctor of Engineering) for her published research in secure data management from the University of Bristol and recently completed a certificate in public policy analysis at the London School of Economics.