New professor of cybersecurity

The University Council has passed a circular resolution to appoint Professor Isabel Wagner as associate professor of cybersecurity in the Faculty of Science. She will take up her post in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science on 1 September 2022.

Isabel Wagner, born in 1979, studied computer science at the University of Erlangen, where she earned her doctorate in 2010 with a thesis in the area of wireless networks. Following a period as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Osaka University in Japan, she worked as a lecturer at the University of Hull, before moving to De Montfort University in Leicester in 2015. There she was appointed senior lecturer in 2016 and promoted to associate professor in computer science (cybersecurity) in 2019.

Wagner’s research activities are focused on privacy protection and privacy-enhancing technologies, particularly metrics to quantify the effectiveness of privacy protection mechanisms. Potential fields of application include smart cities, vehicular networks, smart grids and genomics.

She is also interested in bio-inspired mechanisms for privacy protection and methods to ensure greater transparency in the use of surveillance systems by technology companies. In her 2022 book Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems, Wagner describes how users are monitored by big tech companies, how this surveillance can be investigated experimentally, and what the latest studies have revealed.

The professorship for cybersecurity is based in the subject area of computer science with its focal areas of distributed systems and machine intelligence, and has numerous points of contact with research in other faculties, for example in relation to blockchain and smart contracts or data protection in personalized medicine.