Introducing the new Faculty Leader for Engineering, Dr Sushmita Ruj

Firstly, we would like to thank Dr Helen Paik for her contribution as Faculty Lead for Engineering. Her input has been invaluable, and we wish her the best in her future endeavors and look forward to continuing to work together. 

Filling Helen's shoes as Faculty Lead for Engineering will be Dr Sushmita Ruj. 

Sushmita Ruj is Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, Sydney. Her research interests are in applied cryptography, post quantum cryptography, blockchains and privacy enhancing technologies. She designs practical, efficient, and provably secure protocols that can be deployed in real-world applications. She explores security and privacy issues in cloud, smart grids, and data sharing platforms. She has extensively worked on cryptographic key distribution, identity and access management, secure cloud storage, search/analytics on encrypted data and blockchain security, privacy and scalability.  

She has won several competitive grants like Samsung GRO Award, NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Cisco Academic Grant and IBM Research grant. She is an Associate Editor of the Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Elsevier Journal on Information Security and Applications (JISA) and Elsevier Journal on Pervasive and Mobile computing (PMC). She served as a Program Co-Chair of ACISP 2021 and Indocrypt 2019.  She served as a working group member of The National Blockchain Roadmap of Australia and a working group member of the First Blockchain initiative by Reserve Bank of India.

Before joining UNSW, she was a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61, an Associate Professor at Indian Statistical Institute and an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Indore. She held positions in Lund University, Sweden and University of Ottawa, Canada.

Sushmita is a senior member of both ACM and IEEE.