Biography
Selcuk Uluagac currently serves as a Program Director of the Security, Privacy, and Trust in Cyberspace (SaTC 2.0) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the IPA program. At FIU, he is an Eminent Scholar Chaired Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Science, where he leads the Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab (CSL), and is the Director of the Center for Integrated SEcurity, PRivacy, and Trustworthy AI (CIERTA) with an additional courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before FIU, he was a member of the research faculty as a Senior Research Engineer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech.
Uluagac earned his Ph.D. with a concentration in cybersecurity from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He also received a M.S. in Information Security from the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology and a M.S. in from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, respectively. He is an expert in the areas of cybersecurity and privacy with an emphasis on their practical and applied aspects and teaches classes in these areas. His current work focuses on ransomware, forensics, IoT, CPS security topics. He has hundreds of research papers/studies/publications in cybersecurity and privacy in the most reputable venues such as USENIX Security, NDSS, IEEE TIFS.
In 2015, he received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which is NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Also, in 2015 he was awarded a summer fellowship from the US Air Force Office of Sponsored Research (AFOSR)’s Summer Faculty Fellowship Program. In 2016, he received the Summer Faculty Fellowship from the University of Padova, Italy. He has also received other awards for the quality of his mentoring and research, including (1) FIU President’s Council Real Triumphs Faculty Award, 2023, (2) FIU Faculty Senate Research Excellence Award, 2023, (3) FIU Provost Office Top Scholar Award in Established Faculty with Significant Grants (STEM Category), 2023, (4) FIU Provost Office Top Scholar Award in Faculty with Notable Gains in Student Learning and Success (Sciences) Category, 2021, (5) FIU College of Engineering and Computing Faculty Award in Excellence in Research and Creative Activities Category, 2021, (6) FIU Eminent Scholar Chaired Associate Professor in the College of Engineering and Computing 2020. In 2021, he received Google’s Android Security and Privacy (ASPIRE) Research award and received a fellowship from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy in 2022.
He is also an active member of IEEE (senior grade since 2011), ACM, and ASEE and a regular contributor to national panels and leading journals and conferences in the field. Uluagac has served on the program committees of top-tier security conferences such as IEEE S&P (Oakland), NDSS, USENIX Security, ACM WiSeC, IEEE CNS, ASIACCS, inter alia. He is the TPC Vice Chair of NDSS 2026, was the TPC Chair of the Security and ML Track at ACM CCS 2023, In 2022, he was the TPC Co-Chair of IEEE CNS Conference. He was the General Chair of ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (ACM WiSec) in 2019. In 2018, he co-chaired the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Annual Expo and Conference, which is one of the largest events in the cybersecurity education domain.
Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (Deputy Editor-in-Chief), and Elsevier Computer Networks Journal (Associate Editor). Prior to these, he was an associate editor at IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Elsevier Journal of Network and Computer Applications (JNCA), and network security lead area editor at IEEE Communications and Surveys and Tutorials.
He is very entrepreneurial and visionary with his research. So far, his research has resulted in 23 US patent disclosures (11 already awarded). And, he is very active in the local and national community; his research covered by different media outlets (TV, online, published) numerous times. He is also very active in external funding efforts during his tenure at FIU, successfully securing over $28.8M (PI+Co-PI) with 36+ research grants related to the security and privacy of IoT and CPS areas (total participated in the acquisition of more than $59.6 M with all the collaborators). Specifically, his research was funded by NSF, Department of Energy, National Security Agency, Air Force Research Lab, Cyber Florida, Microsoft, Google, Trend Micro, Department Of Labor, Cisco, inter alia.
Awards & Honors
- Best security and privacy paper award by IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, December 2023
- FIU President’s Council Real Triumphs Faculty Award, 2023
- Best paper award, IEEE DSN Conference, 2023
- FIU Faculty Senate Research Excellence Award, 2023
- FIU Provost Office Top Scholar Award in Established Faculty with Significant Grants (STEM) Category, 2023
- Faculty Fellowship from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, 2022.
- Google – ASPIRE- Android Security and Privacy Research Award, November 2021
- FIU Provost Top Scholar Award in Faculty with Notable Gains in Student Learning and Success Category, 2021
- FIU College of Eng. & Computing Faculty Award in Excellence in Research & Creative Activities Category, 2021
- FIU Eminent Scholar Chaired Associate Professor in the College of Engineering and Computing, 2020
- Service Award for Contributions as General Chair by Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), to 12th ACM International Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), 2019
- Faculty Fellowship Award by the University of Padova, Department of Mathematics, Italy, 2016
- NSF CAREER Award by the National Science Foundation (NSF), in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations, 2015
- Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Award by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 2015
Education
- Georgia Institute of Technology Electrical and Computer Engineering Ph.D. 2010
- Georgia Institute of Technology Information Security M.S. 2009
- Carnegie Mellon University Electrical and Computer Engineering M.S. 2002