Three new professorships were filled at the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security (HGI). While Prof. Dr. Asja Fischer and Prof. Dr. Sascha Fahl started their work at the HGI in April, Prof. Dr. Martina Angela Sasse followed at the beginning of May.
Prof. Dr. Martina Angela Sasse will head the Chair of Human-Centred Security at HGI at the RUB from 1 May 2018. Ms. Sasse was previously Professor of Human-Centred Technology at University College London (UCL) in the United Kingdom, where she was one of the first researchers to study users' understanding and behaviour with regard to security. From 2012 to 2017 she headed the British Research Institute for Empirical Security Research and was admitted to the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2015. She studied psychology at the University of Wuppertal in the 1980s and continued her studies in Great Britain. She then received a Masters degree in Industrial Psychology from Sheffield University and a PhD in Computer Science from Birmingham University before joining UCL as a lecturer in 1990.
Another new member of the HGI is Prof. Dr. Sascha Fahl. Since April 1, he has held the new professorship in the field of IT security and is now head of the Chair of Usable Security and Privacy. Among other things, he examines the question of what influence the human factor has on IT security and data protection mechanisms. In addition to the end user as an important user group of IT security and data protection mechanisms, he also examines key players such as software developers, system administrators or IT system designers. Only recently he was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize 2018 for his outstanding achievements in IT security research. The prize is awarded once a year by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Also at the HGI since April 1: Prof. Dr. Asja Fischer, who will be junior professor for machine learning at the institute. After studying biology at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum in 2005, she studied bioinformatics at the University of Lisbon. She continued her studies in cognitive science and mathematics at the University of Osnabrück and the Ruhr University of Bochum, graduating with a Master of Science degree in 2009. After receiving her doctorate in 2014, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Montréal Institute for Machine Learning at the University of Montreal and subsequently as an assistant professor in the field of Smart Data Analysis at the University of Bonn.
We welcome you to the HGI of the RUB and wish Mrs. Sasse, Mr. Fahl and Mrs. Fischer a good start.
General note: In case of using gender-assigning attributes we include all those who consider themselves in this gender regardless of their own biological sex.