The UK does not have enough cybersecurity experts who can work across engineering, policy, and crime prevention—and the threats are growing. This Centre for Doctoral Training will produce a new generation of researchers who can design secure IT systems, disrupt cybercrime, and craft effective public policy, all at once. Why this matters: Government and industry reports consistently identify a shortage of people who understand both the technical and human sides of cybersecurity. Attacks on power grids, election systems, and private companies demand experts who can move between code, organisational behaviour, and regulation—not just specialists in one area. If successful, graduates will take leadership roles in government, private industry, and civil society. They will be equipped to protect critical national infrastructure—from energy grids to communications networks—and to design policies that safeguard democratic institutions and public welfare. The programme also embeds industrial internships, so students confront real-world challenges before they graduate. This is a skills pipeline, not a single research project: its impact will be measured in the people it produces, not the papers it publishes.
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Recent reports from the Royal Society, the government Cybersecurity strategy, as well as the National Cyber Security Center highlight the importance of cybersecurity, in ensuring a safe information society. They highlight the challenges faced by the UK in this domain, and in particular the challenges this field poses: from a need for multi-disciplinary expertise and work to address complex challenges, that span from high-level policy to detailed engineering; to the need for an integrated approach between government initiatives, private industry initiatives and wider civil society to tackle both cybercrime and nation state interference into national infrastructures, from power grids to election systems. They conclude that expertise is lacking, particularly when it comes to multi-disciplinary experts with good understanding of effective work both in government and industry. The EPSRC Doctoral Training Center in Cybersecurity addresses this challenge, and aims to train multidisciplinary experts in engineering secure IT systems, tacking and interdicting cybercrime and formulating effective public policy interventions in this domain. The training provided provides expertise in all those areas through a combination of taught modules, and training in conducting original world-class research in those fields. Graduates will be domain experts in more than one of the subfields of cybersecurity, namely Human, Organizational and Regulatory aspects; Attacks, Defences and Cybercrime; Systems security and Cryptography; Program, Software and Platform Security and Infrastructure Security. They will receive training in using techniques from computing, social sciences, crime science and public policy to find appropriate solutions to problems within those domains. Further, they will be trained in responsible research and innovation to ensure both research, but also technology transfer and policy interventions are protective of people's rights, are compatible with democratic institutions, and improve the welfare of the public. Through a program of industrial internships all doctoral students will familiarize themselves with the technologies, polices and also challenges faced by real-world organizations, large and small, trying to tackle cybersecurity challenges. Therefore they will be equipped to assume leadership positions to solve those problems upon graduation.
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