The UMBC Cybersecurity Institute (UCI) provides unified academic and research leadership, partnership, innovation, and public outreach in this critical discipline. As a reflection of cybersecurity itself, our interests in cybersecurity are not just technical, but include the social, behavioral, operational, and economic elements of cybersecurity as well.
UCI leadership and UMBC’s cybersecurity faculty are actively engaged with government, industry, and academic organizations and individuals and remain fully informed on the current state of cybersecurity education, research, and operational workforce issues related to the cyber domain. For external advice, UCI draws upon the CSEE industrial advisory board which includes senior and executive cybersecurity expertise; to respect participants time, UCI does not maintain a separate external advisory board.
Cybersecurity Vision & Goals
UMBC’s cybersecurity vision, informed by collaborative real-world perspectives, acknowledges that effective cybersecurity requires both successful technical competence and an understanding of how human factors such as policy, user experiences, and operational processes are intertwined with cybersecurity outcomes. Accordingly, our approach to cybersecurity is based upon four pillars:
- Education: Providing quality undergraduate and graduate education and workforce development in cybersecurity-related fields through interdisciplinary academic and non-credit training programs that are rooted in academically evaluated and industry accepted best practices.
- Research: Conducting innovative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative inquiry into cybersecurity and cybersecurity-related issues from both the technical and social science perspectives.
- Entrepreneurship: Working with industry locally and around the world to incubate and grow new cybersecurity companies offering innovative products and services and transferring our intellectual capital from university research into practice.
- Partnership: Engaging in proactive, innovative collaborations and synergistic activities with industry, academia, and government entities that lead to mutually beneficial outcomes across the educational, research, and entrepreneurial spectrum both locally and globally.
UCI draws upon UMBC’s many interdisciplinary strengths and forward-thinking activities to streamle our academic, research, workforce development, and technology incubation activities to advance UMBC’s position as a leading research university in cybersecurity-related disciplines. Through UCI, UMBC is one of the few universities in the nation designated both a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD) and National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research (CAE-R) by the National Security Agency and has been a leading participant in the NSF Federal CyberCorps/SFS program since 2012.