Ravi Sandhu

Inventor of 29 security technology patents and leader of multiple teams conducting research on many aspects of cyber security, Sandhu has served as Executive Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio from 2007, where he has held the Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair in Cyber Security in the Department of Computer Science. He was born in India, where he was schooled at Doon School in Dehradun. Sandhu became a U.S. citizen in 1997. He held B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from IIT Bombay and Delhi, respectively, and received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Prior to his position at the University of Texas, San Antonio, he joined the faculty at Ohio State University in 1982, remaining until 1989, and then joined George Mason University from 1989 to 2007. Sandhu is a 2001 ACM Fellow, 2002 IEEE Fellow, and a 2008 AAAS Fellow. He has received awards from IEEE, ACM, NSA, and NIST, including the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, "For outstanding and pioneering contributions to information security including innovation of the role-based access control model and usage control." He is also a recipient of the 2008 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2012 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, and the 1992 and 1998 NIST/NSA National Computer Security Conference Best Paper Awards.

A prolific and highly cited author, Sandhu's research has been funded by NSF, NSA, NIST, DARPA, AFOSR, ONR, AFRL, and private industry. He has co-authored over 250 papers, accumulating over 25,000 Google Scholar citations. His paper on role-based access control established it as the dominant form of access control in practical systems, accumulating over 6,000 citations. His numerous other models and mechanisms have also had considerable influence, and he is ranked as the number one non-cryptographer and number five overall at Microsoft Academic Search for Security and Privacy.

Sandhu has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and as founding General Chair of the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy. He has served as founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security and on the Editorial Board for IEEE Internet Computing. He has served as Chairman of ACM SIGSAC and founded the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security and the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, chairing their Steering Committees for many years. He has also served as General Chair, Program Chair, and Committee Member for numerous security conferences.

From 2000 to 2010, he co-founded and served as Chief Scientist of TriCipher, a Silicon Valley security start-up that was acquired by VMW in 2010. In addition to being a worldwide lecturer, Sandhu has consulted for leading industry and government organizations including McAfee, Trusted Information Systems, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Verizon, SETA Corporation, Argonne National Laboratory, Singapore Management University, Northrop Grumman, and Integris Health. He is an inventor on 29 security technology patents.

At the Institute for Cyber Security, he has led multiple teams conducting research on many aspects of cyber security, including secure information sharing, social computing security, cloud computing security, secure data provenance, attribute-based access control, and botnet analysis and detection, in collaboration with researchers across the world.