Biography

From 2005 - 2007 I studied Computer Science and Engineering at Cambridge as a Gates Scholar. My time in Cambridge, both my research and my experience with Gates, formed part of a trajectory which has led me back to Cambridge for a PhD. I spent the intervening ten years designing, operating, and securing safety-critical industrial control systems. These are the systems one might find controlling temperature in a home, the fuel pump in a car, a defibrillator in a hospital, power converters in a wind farm, or robotic arms in a factory. They are efficient, perform repetitive tasks with precision, and keep people safe; however, as these systems grow in complexity, reliability and security become harder to demonstrate and maintain over the course of the system’s life. My research explores the interface between a control system and its environment, which the system senses and manipulates; how that environment could be used to maliciously modify the control system’s behaviour; and how to design resilient systems which maintain their nominal behaviour in adversarial environments. I hope this work will form part of a foundation to build and maintain trust in these ubiquitous, safety-critical systems, even as they become more attractive targets for malicious activity.