9/14/2009 11:46:00 PM ITI Staff
Written by ITI Staff
The Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has announced the first recipients of scholarships under its new Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP), which supports undergraduate students at Illinois who are U.S. citizens working towards careers in information trust. The 2009 winners include:
- Ryan Glenn, a junior from O'Fallon, Illinois, majoring in Computer Engineering
- Raul Gonzalez, a senior from Elgin, Illinois, majoring in Computer Science
- David Grochocki Jr., a junior from Crystal Lake, Illinois, majoring in Computer Engineering with a minor in Business
- Joe Mansour, a senior from Dixon, Illinois, majoring in Computer Science
- Austin Rappeport, a junior from Ottawa, Illinois, majoring in Computer Engineering
- Tim Sally, a junior from Deerfield, Illinois, majoring in Computer Science
The winners were selected from a competitive pool of applicants following a review process designed to identify students with the greatest potential to succeed in careers related to information trust.
Dr. Masooda Bashir, who is ITI's Assistant Director for Social Trust Initiatives and the program director of the new ICSSP program, praised the recipients.
"We are very excited to have these talented students as our first class in the program," she said. "I believe this scholarship provides an excellent opportunity for them to pursue careers in information assurance."
The scholarship recipients have a broad range of technical interests and career goals, but all of them are looking forward to the benefits of participating in the ICSSP program. "The opportunity to work with some amazing professors in the area of computer security is what attracted me to the program," said Mansour.
"I've already begun to realize the advantages of the contacts that I'll make through ICSSP."
ICSSP was created this year with $1.25 million in funding from the Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program of the National Science Foundation. SFS's mission is to increase the number of students entering the fields of computer security and information assurance, with the ultimate objective of improving the U.S. government's ability to protect its own information infrastructure.
Under the terms of the ICSSP program, each participating student will receive a scholarship and stipend covering the last two years of undergraduate study, and in exchange will commit to work for two years following graduation as an information assurance specialist in the federal government.
Professor Roy Campbell of the Department of Computer Science and ITI at Illinois is the principal investigator of ICSSP research. ICSSP scholarships will be awarded annually. Interested students can visit the ITI web site at www.iti.illinois.edu for more information. Applications will be due in the spring for scholarships beginning in the fall.
About the Information Trust Institute (ITI)
The Information Trust Institute is a multidisciplinary cross-campus research unit housed in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is an international leader combining research and education with industrial outreach in trustworthy and secure information systems. ITI brings together over 90 faculty, many senior and graduate student researchers, and industry partners to conduct foundational and applied research to enable the creation of critical applications and cyber infrastructures. In doing so, ITI is creating computer systems, software, and networks that society can depend on to be trustworthy, that is, secure, dependable (reliable and available), correct, safe, private, and survivable. Instead of concentrating on narrow and focused technical solutions, ITI aims to create a new paradigm for designing trustworthy systems from the ground up and validating systems that are intended to be trustworthy. www.iti.illinois.edu
Contact: Jenny Applequist, Information Trust Institute, 217/244-8920, applequi AT iti.illinois.edu.
Released September 14, 2009
A printable PDF version of this press release and a high-resolution photo are available online.