I am Associate Professor at University College Dublin at the School of Computer Science and a funded investigator at Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre. I am also the Director of the UCD MSc in Cybersecurity.
I am part of the SPARE research group.
My research interests include requirements engineering and adaptive systems. My work has focused on using runtime models to engineer complex systems, including cyber-physical systems, in order to satisfy their security requirements, and ensure that they are forensic-ready and comply with data protection regulations.
If you are interested in doing research about secure software engineering and have a passion for making things concrete and not just on paper, drop me a line. Several thesis topics, as well as smaller projects are available around the following themes: secure software engineering, engineering forensic-ready software systems, requirements engineering.
News
01/02/2025 SEAMS'25 Paper: The paper entitled "Towards Using Inductive Learning to Adapt Security Controls in Smart Homes" was accepted to the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2025).
01/09/2024 IEEE Security \& Privacy Column: The paper entitled "The Rocky Road To Sustainable Security" was accepted to the IEEE Security \& Privacy Magazine - Building Security In Column.
01/08/2024 JSS Paper: The paper entitled "GDPR compliance via software evolution: Weaving security controls in software design" was accepted to the JSS journal.
13/06/2024 Lero Research Award: I was one of the recipients of the Lero Research Award which aims to incentivise and reward continued impactful and outstanding research among Lero members nationwide.
Service
Scientific events I am currently involved in:
ICSE 2025 (PC Member): 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023).
SEAMS 2025 (PC Member): 20th International Conference on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2025).
FSE 2025 (PC Member): ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE).
ASE 2025 (PC Member): 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.
PhD Students
I am lucky to supervise the following PhD students:
Minh Nguyen, Securing AI-Based Coding Assistants, co-supervised with Dr. Alzubair Hassan.
Alkabashi Alnour, Engineering Adaptive Authentication, co-supervised with Dr. Alzubair Hassan and Prof. Bashar Nuseibeh.
Faithful Chiagoziem Onweugbuche, Adaptive Ransomware Detection, co-supervised with Dr. Anca Jurcut.
Kushal Ramkumar, Sustainable Adaptive Security, co-supervised with Prof. Bashar Nuseibeh.
Ruth Buckley, Cyber Information Sharing in ISACs, co-supervised with Profs. Markus Helfert and Bashar Nuseibeh.
Past PhD Students
Konstantinos Ntafloukas, "Cyber Risk Assessment in Critical Transportation Infrastructures". Konstantinos is now R&D Engineer at INLECOM (Greece).
Fanny Rivera-Ortiz, "Engineering Forensic-Ready Software Systems". Fanny is now Post-Doctoral researcher at the National College of Ireland.
Mazen Azzam, "Physics-based Early Warnings for Forensic Readiness in Industrial Control Systems". Mazen is now Optical Sensing Engineer at ASML, The Netherlands.
Faeq Alrimawi, "Software Engineering for Forensic-Ready Cyber-Physical Systems".
Faeq is now Assistant Professor at the University of Limerick.