Professor Raquel Hill has been named Director of Cybersecurity at Indiana University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SICE). A three-year appointment, her role will be focussing the school’s multi-disciplinary resources to focus on cybersecurity education for graduate students in the program as well as undergraduate students at the university with security majors and minors.
Dr. Raquel Hill is an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University.
Dr. Hill‘s primary research interests span the areas of trust, security, and data privacy. Her more recent work on data privacy uses the semantics of data to create privacy preserving frameworks for text data. In 2016, Dr. Hill was selected and featured in Indiana University‘s Brilliant Minds series. In 2017 her inter-disciplinary work on the re-identification risks in behavioral science data was featured in Forbes Magazine. Her latest project explores how online data is used during the hiring process and seeks to create a bias-free framework for evaluating job applications. It was presented at the Cybersecurity Research Acceleration Workshop Leveling the Digital Playing Field for the Jobseeker.
Dr. Hill is filling the position at a critical time for the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. The Security & Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering center (SPICE) has expanded its educational offerings to include courses such as Cyber Defense Competitions, and joint research with CRANE Naval Warfare Center. Additional improvements include the move to Luddy Hall, and the opening of SPICE’s Internet of Things research house on the Bloomington campus.
Speaking with Professor Hill about her taking on this new position, she explained why she took on the role.
I am an educator who is passionate about cybersecurity. Securing our cyber infrastructure is absolutely essential for maintaining our quality of life and sustaining and growing our economy. Almost every aspect of our lives requires some level of understanding of systems security; whether it’s choosing a pin for our cellphones, configuring home routers, applying software updates, or ensuring that an encrypted channel is established when logging into a website. We cannot meet the current demand for trained cybersecurity professionals. One major obstacle is student awareness. As the Director of Cybersecurity for SICE, one of my main goals is to engage students in the topic early in their academic career; including outreach to pre-college students.
Almost daily, there is a new report about a major data or computer breach. These breaches affect individuals, our communities, corporations, and government entities If you don’t have people in those organizations that can identify the sensitive resources that are to be protected, specify the goals for securing the resources, define the policies for satisfying those goals, and create the mechanisms for enforcing those policies, then the environment cannot be secured. We have great Ph.D and Masters programs, students, and educators. We offer courses of instruction in all aspects of systems security and data privacy, and we look forward to training the next generation of cybersecurity professionals and researchers who will help to shape the cybersecurity landscape in Indiana and beyond.