Cyber Security & Systems Engineering 2025 PhD Projects

The Centre for Cybersecurity, IoT and Cyber-physical systems (CIC) is the main research group associated with the Cybersecurity and Systems Engineering (CSE) subject group in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment (SCEBE) at Edinburgh Napier University. The research, knowledge exchange, and innovation work covers a wide spectrum of areas including cybersecurity, networking, energy engineering, applied cryptography and blockchain, data science and cybersecurity, digital twins, intelligent control, robotics, wireless communications, sensors, RF system, digital forensics, electronics and IoT security. This applies is applied into many application areas, including FinTech, NetZero, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Health Care, Critical Infrastructure Protection, Identity Systems, 5G/6G wireless networks and Law Enforcement.

Overall, the Centre is led by seven internationally-leading professors (Bill Buchanan, Hongnian Yu, Amir Hussain, Ahmed Al-Dubai, Leandros Maglaras, Berk Canberk and Xiadong Liu), 10 Associate Professors and 26 Academics, and has received a wide range of funding including from EPSRC, Horizon Europe, Innovate UK and industry. For engineering, the subject group is rated in the Top 250 in the world in the recent Times Higher World University rankings, and within the Top 300 for Computer Science. The Centre also has 20 leading academics who are rated in the Top 2% of scientific authors within 2022. A core strength of the Centre is the translation of research into high impact outputs and impacts to industry. This includes three highly successful spin-out companies (Zonefox, Symphonic and Cyacomb), along with two forthcoming spin-outs (True Deploy and LastingAsset). For its submission to REF 2021, 38% of its research outputs were rated as world-class (4*), and its impact case studies were all rated as world-leading.

Funded

Multimodal Multilingual Sentiment Analysis (Funded)

Supervisor – Dr Kia Dashtipour

Adaptive physical layer security for connected autonomous vehicles (Funded)

Supervisor – Prof. Petros Karadimas

Optimum antenna arrays for 6G wireless communications (Funded)

Supervisor – Prof. Petros Karadimas

Optimum compact MIMO antennas for 6G mobile devices (Funded)

Supervisor – Prof. Petros Karadimas

Multi-Three-Phase Drives for Electric Transport (Funded)

Supervisor – Dr Savvas Papadopoulos

Exploring cyberattacks against AI and their real-world impact (Funded)

Supervisor – Dr Nikolaos Pitropakis

Design and Development of Green Miniaturised Balanced Antennas and Antenna Arrays for Future Sustainable Electronics Devices (Funded)

Supervisor – Dr Chan Hwang See

Wireless Power, Sensing and Communication Network (Funded)

Supervisor – Dr Chan Hwang See

Utilisation of Machine Learning for Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks (Funded)

Supervisor – Dr Craig Thomson

Advanced digital signal processing for condition monitoring for rotative electical machines (Funded)

Supervisor – Dr Francisco Vedreno Santos

Self funded

Developing a coordinated control for hybrid ac/dc microgrids with renewable sources-battery storage under dynamic generation and load conditions (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Jubaer Ahmed

zk-Cloud Forensics: Privacy-Aware and Tamper-proof Cloud Forensics using a Public Key Trust Infrastructure (Self funded)

Supervisor – Prof. Bill Buchanan

Advanced Encryption Research for Orbital Systems and Aerospace Field Encryption (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr. Luigi La Spada

Machine Learning Algorithms for Improving Predictive Maintenance in Industrial Automation Systems (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr. Luigi La Spada

Quantum-Integrated Genomic Models for the Advancement in Early Detection and Understanding of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr. Luigi La Spada

Behavioural Analysis for Ransomware and Extortion-based Attack Detection (Self funded)

Supervisor – Rich Macfarlane

Novel E2E mechanisms for mobile devices (Self funded)

Supervisor – Prof. Leandros Maglaras

On-the-go EV charging methods (Self funded)

Supervisor – Prof. Leandros Maglaras

Secure V2V Communication for self-driving NETworks (Self funded)

Supervisor – Prof. Leandros Maglaras

Flexible Electrochemical Multi sensors For online Water Quality Monitoring (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Libu Manjakkal

An Electric Vehicle and Electric Vehicle Charging Station Incident Response Playbook (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Naghmeh Moradpoor

Communication Efficiency for Federated Learning in Critical Infrastructure (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Naghmeh Moradpoor

Novel Model Aggregation Techniques for Federated Learning in Critical Infrastructure (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Naghmeh Moradpoor

Intelligent Metamaterials/Metasurfaces for 5G/6G Wireless Networks (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Naser Ojaroudi Parchin

Phased Array Antenna Systems for MM-Wave/THz Communications (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Naser Ojaroudi Parchin

Reconfigurable Surfaces for High-Efficiency RF Energy Harvesting (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Naser Ojaroudi Parchin

Forensic storage carving using AI (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Gordon Russell

Introspection of Virtual Machines using AI (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Gordon Russell

Machine unlearning for large language models (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Zhiyuan Tan

Security and Privacy in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Zhiyuan Tan

Security of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure (Self funded)

Supervisor – Dr Zhiyuan Tan