Mohd Hasan Ali
10/30/2023
10/10/2023
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)/Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded $8M Dollars grant to the National Cybersecurity Preparedness Consortium NCPC (nationalcpc.org) of which the University of Memphis is a core member in 5 University Consortium. As part of this grant, the University of Memphis’s Center for Information Assurance (CfIA) received $1M grant for 3 years to conduct a project titled “Cybersecurity Issues with Operational Technology and Distributed Energy Resources”. Dr Mohd. Hasan Ali from Electrical and Computer Engineering, an Associate Director of the center will serve as the Principal Investigator (PI) and Dr. Dipankar Dasgupta of Computer Science, the Center Director, as the Co-PI on this project. The overall goal of the project is to design and develop cybersecurity-related education and training for operation technology (OT) and distributed energy resources (DERs) in order to address the technical needs of future workforce and industry professionals in various sectors. Moreover, this project aims to develop an outreach program that will demonstrate in-person hands-on exercises and experiments. The hands-on activities will cover topics from security in OT and DER which will also be introduced in some related university classes for pilot testing. This is important for state and local professionals and employees in specific sectors to transition theory to practice to deal with cybersecurity challenges.