The University of Houston (UH) seeks to establish a CyberCorps(R): Scholarship for Service (SFS) program to prepare graduate students for government service in order to help secure, protect and defend our Nation's information systems. UH proposes to support 3 PhD students and 9 MS students. UH is classified as a Very High Research University, is classified as a Hispanic-Serving institution, and has been designated as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education since 2009. This project seeks to address the needs of the Gulf-coast region and beyond, the need of the nation for cybersecurity professionals, and the need for more women and underrepresented minorities in cybersecurity.
The focus of the project is on enriching cybersecurity education with related fields such as data mining, machine learning, statistics and natural language processing. UH proposes to build a community of well-qualified scholars in trusted computing, provide a rich set of theoretical and applied cybersecurity experiences for the students, foster diversity in the student pool, and disseminate successful models of cybersecurity education to the nation. The education plan includes the use of cyberwar and laboratory exercises for community building and peer mentoring. Professional development activities planned include workshops focused on professional skill development, seminars, and external visits to government agencies and research institutes.
