Waleed Farag is a professor of computer science and the director of IUP’s Institute for Cybersecurity. As PI, Farag has secured 29 major funded grants with budgets exceeding $17 million to support his scholarly work. These projects, funded by the NSF, DoD, and NSA, established unique initiatives that contribute to the enhancement of cybersecurity research and education across the nation. He is currently the PI of two cutting-edge funded research projects: IoT Anomaly Detection and ARMZTA. Additionally, he is leading other projects including the PC4A (largest grant in IUP history), the Cyber Scholarship Program, and GenCyber, among others.

Dr. Farag research interests include autonomous risk mitigation, security of IoT, applications of AI and machine learning, cybersecurity education, e-learning, multimedia data security, information hiding, and multimedia indexing and retrieval techniques and applications. He has several contributions in these areas and has published over 70 articles, book chapters and papers in journals, conferences, and workshops. His work was awarded Best Paper in ACM SIGITE’2012 and other conferences. He is a member of Sigma Xi, ACM and IEEE.

Dr. Farag was selected from a handful of national experts as a referee for the $16-million National Cybersecurity Curriculum Project. He serves on the TPC of several major publications and as an external evaluator of faculty promotion applications for several universities across the US. In recognition of his unprecedented achievements, Farag was awarded the Senate Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, the inaugural Raising the Research Profile of IUP and the KCNSM 2023 Dean’s Outstanding Researcher awards. He also received numerous IUP Sponsored Programs awards for Outstanding Achievements in Research, Public Service, Commitment to Sponsored Programs, and Centers and Institutes.

Dr. Farag oversees the IUP Cybersecurity program which has been designated as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education since the early 2000s. He organized several security conferences and meetings, including the IUP Annual Cybersecurity Days, IUP Cybersecurity Seminars and has hosted several nationally recognized security experts who presented at these events and others. Dr. Farag received his PhD in Computer Science in 2002 from Old Dominion University, USA. He also holds a Master in Engineering and Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, both from Zagazig University, Egypt.