Two faculty members installed as Kevin O’Sullivan Endowed Professors in Cybersecurity

The inaugural Kevin O’Sullivan Endowed Professorships in Cybersecurity were announced Sept. 17 at an installation ceremony at RIT’s University Gallery.

Billy Brumley and Matthew Wright were appointed for their work in building RIT’s cybersecurity education and research legacy. As one of the highest honors in academia, endowed professorships recognize and support outstanding researchers and educators who profoundly impact the lives of their students.

Endowments create a source of funding in perpetuity that help support and retain cutting-edge, award-winning teaching and research faculty. These endowed professorships ensure that RIT students will continue to work alongside and learn from best-in-class researchers and educators.

The endowed professorships were made possible by a $50 million gift from alumnus Austin McChord ’09. In naming the awards, McChord chose to honor a teacher who inspired him to achieve great things. Kevin O’Sullivan is a retired mathematics teacher who taught McChord calculus at Newtown High School located in Sandy Hook, Conn.

“I consider myself fortunate to have had a career spanning 40 years where each day was an opportunity to help young people feel confident that they would ultimately be successful with mathematics,” said O’Sullivan. “I am truly thankful and humbled by Austin’s recognition and wish to offer my sincere hope that RIT will succeed in its quest to make the cyber world a safer place.”

Key functions of endowed positions are to showcase the ongoing contributions of faculty, while providing funding and support to move research and scholarship forward. A strong, engaged base of faculty talent helps to enrich the entire academic experience for students, from providing comprehensive support to graduate researchers to building a framework that attracts the best undergraduate students.

Brumley is a professor in the Department of Cybersecurity and director of research in RIT’s ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute.

Before joining RIT, Brumley spent a decade as a professor at Tampere University in Finland and was recognized as a 2018 European Research Council Starting Grant Laureate. Brumley is a specialist in system security, cryptography engineering, and side-channel analysis, who also brings industry experience as a staff engineer for Qualcomm’s Product Security Initiative in San Diego.

With the endowment, Brumley has been able to build and ramp up his platform security research laboratory, PLATSEC. He said the biggest influence is the ability to hire early career researchers, like postdocs.

“Staffing at this level is atypical for an academic start-up package,” said Brumley. “It’s like a turbo button on a video game controller, except for research excellence.”

Wright is a professor and chair of RIT’s Department of Cybersecurity, whose research focuses on adversarial machine learning, distributed systems, and usable security. He has been the lead investigator on more than $5.8 million in externally funded projects and has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers.

“I’m deeply honored to receive this endowment and I’ve been blessed to be able to collaborate with many terrific colleagues, mentors, and students over the years,” said Wright. “I look forward to continue working in strong teams to tackle challenges in cybersecurity, such as our work on building usable deepfake detection tools and on detecting and analyzing malware.”