March 7, 2023

Through a variety of projects, including work being done as part of UNT’s Center for Information and Cyber Security (CICS), an interdisciplinary group of researchers is working to ensure tomorrow’s workforce is made up of knowledgeable people to address future threats.

BY: TRISTA MOXLEY

A major link to decreasing cyber risk in the future, especially for businesses, is hiring the right people. Through a variety of projects, including work being done as part of UNT’s Center for Information and Cyber Security (CICS), an interdisciplinary group of researchers is working to ensure tomorrow’s workforce is made up of knowledgeable people to address future threats.

To help ease the cybersecurity industry’s growing demand and spark interest in the field, UNT added new cybersecurity degree programs at the bachelor’s and master’s levels in 2020 and has hosted cybersecurity summer camps for middle and high school students as part of the national GenCyber Academy, supported by the National Security Agency and National Science Foundation. UNT faculty across disciplines are engaging in research aimed to strengthen and expand the cybersecurity workforce.

James Parrish, assistant professor of information technology and decision sciences, is working on creating and implementing a program to understand why underrepresented populations don’t go into cybersecurity fields and help move them toward those jobs.

“We’re facing threats from a heterogeneous group of actors and trying to prevent those threats with a very homogeneous cybersecurity workforce,” Parrish says. “We need more diversity, perspectives and backgrounds to combat the diverse group of threat actors.”

Additionally, computer science and engineering faculty Ram Dantu and Mark Thompson teamed up for a series of projects funded by the NSA focused on increasing the number and quality of cybersecurity professionals.

Dan J. Kim, professor of information technology and decision sciences, has been funded by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education to study ways of enhancing cybersecurity tasks, knowledge and skills for education and workforce development.

“By identifying relationships among cybersecurity job associative components, we can analyze and compare existing cybersecurity workforce frameworks and work for something better,” Kim says.

Read more about how UNT researchers are working to outsmart cyber criminals and help build a growing workforce of professionals.