Dina G. Mahmoud Awarded CYD Doctoral Fellowship
© Gina G. Mahmoud, 2020
One of the first recipients of the Cyber-Defence Campus (CYD) Doctoral Fellowship is Dina G. Mahmoud, Doctoral Assistant at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC). The program recognizes and supports researchers by awarding Master Thesis, Doctoral and Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowships.
In January 2019, the CYD was established to anticipate and counter cyber threats. It then joined forces with EPFL to launch the “CYD Fellowships – A Talent Program for Cyber-Defence Research.”
Dina first visited EPFL in summer 2018, as part of the Summer@EPFL internship program (1.9% acceptance rate). In 2019, Dina won an IC School Fellowship and entered the EDIC doctoral program. Her research, in collaboration with Mirjana Stojilović, focuses on fault attacks on FPGA-based platforms. Dina’s work was published at the “Design, Automation and Test in Europe” (DATE) conference in 2019 and the “Field-Programmable Logic and Applications” (FPL) conference in 2020.
"It is a great honor to be the first recipient of the CYD Doctoral Fellowship," says Mahmoud. "I am excited at the opportunity to collaborate with them and hope that my research will significantly contribute to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of cyber-physical systems."
As a CYD Doctoral Fellow, Dina will conduct research on vulnerabilities and backdoors in heterogeneous hardware platforms, for protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of cyber and cyber-physical systems.
This fellowship will provide Dina with salary, research and travel expenses for three years (with a possible one-year extension). She was selected based on her strong background on hardware security and her motivation to engage with critical issues in cyber defence.
The CYD-EPFL joint initiative is expected to play a major role in encouraging the training of the next generation of leading researchers in cyber-security in Switzerland, of which Dina is a prime example. Apart from the Fellowship program to train young researchers, the CYD also works to identify new developments in cyber space, promote technological and market monitoring and international scouting, and develop a collaboration network with industry leaders and academia.