Bo Chen is named Center Director of the ICC Cybersecurity Center
The change is effective as of today, as predecessor Guy Hembroff, who demonstrated strong leadership during his appointment as center director, has amicably stepped down to pursue a new leadership role at Michigan Tech and take a sabbatical.
Following establishment in 2015, the ICC has expanded dramatically and utilizes centers to organize members based on common research areas. An ICC member can be a member of multiple ICC centers, which is the case for many current members. This system helps to connect ICC members across diverse disciplines. The path to progress is paved in part by the leaders who step up along the way.
During Dr. Hembroff’s time as the Center Director, he has developed strategic initiatives to help expand the scope of cybersecurity and privacy research at Michigan Tech, assisted members in writing/reviewing proposals, and collaborated with the ICC director (Dr. Tim Havens) in providing seed funding support for Center members’ early stage research to attain external funding, publications, and conference presentations.
“Guy has led ICC CyberS since the ICC was first established,” said Havens, “and I would like to extend a huge thanks to him for his service to the ICC. Cybersecurity at Michigan Tech has seen significant growth, both as a discipline and an area of research, and ICC CyberS has certainly been a big part of that growth. I very much look forward to continuing to work with Guy in his future new role.”
New Center Director Bo Chen looks to promote cybersecurity research, education, and outreach, expanding MTU’s influence in the field of cybersecurity. He also looks to foster partnerships among cybersecurity center researchers and facilitate connections between the cybersecurity center and other ICC centers, as well as other research centers and institutes at MTU.
“Bo has been a stalwart research leader in the ICC and College of Computing,” says Tim Havens, director of the GLRC, “His experiences at the helm of the nationally-ranked RedTeam together with his strong record of continuous research funding positions him well to succeed in leading strategic growth of ICC CyberS.”
Bo Chen is the principal investigator of a project funded by the National Science Foundation for $613,000 to research secure self-repairing decentralized cloud storage systems. He has broad research interests on cybersecurity and his research has been funded by federal agencies as both PI (more than $1.1M) and co-PI (more than $3.8M). He has published more than 60 papers in prestigious conferences and journals and has received three best paper awards in recent years. He received the ICC Achievement Award in 2019 and the Research Excellence Fund Award in 2020. He has served as general chairs for multiple international conferences on cybersecurity, including 2023 International Conference on Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems and Smart Vehicles (SmartSP) and the 2021 International Conference on Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications (AC3). He has also served on the technical program committee of more than 50 international conferences. He is a senior member of IEEE and a distinguished member of EAI (European Alliance for Innovation).