Eliana Stavrou

Dr. Eliana Stavrou holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Cybersecurity) from the University of Cyprus and a Master in Advanced Information Technologies from the same university. Dr. Stavrou is performing applied research in the area of cybersecurity education to address the challenges relevant to developing cybersecurity capabilities. Specifically, she is developing specialized educational and training curricula, and realistic practical activities, using innovative pedagogies and educational technologies to achieve effective teaching and learning. Dr. Stavrou has a special interest in the development of cyber resilience competencies, empowering people to anticipate, defend, recover from and adapt to cyber-attacks, through the promotion of a cyber situational awareness culture. In this context, her investigations focus on threat profiling aspects in different environments e.g., SMEs, critical Information Systems (IS), etc., to identify the attack exposure and to improve workforce and ISs capabilities. Primary sources of threat information and classification informing her investigations, include industrial cybersecurity frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK matrixes, and threat intelligence information shared by the cyber community. Moreover, she is working towards bridging the skills shortage in cybersecurity by highlighting the multidisciplinary nature of cybersecurity and attracting people with different backgrounds to work in this area. Beyond upskilling the workforce, she also has a special interest to improve the cyber resilience capabilities of citizens. To this end, she is developing educational content and practical activities to improve citizens’ cybersecurity situational awareness, and to promote a culture of best practices, starting from an early childhood, e.g., engaging kids through STEM. She is also investigating security challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT), developing security solutions across the IoT ecosystem. Dr. Stavrou is a member of several working groups and advisory boards related to cybersecurity capabilities development, research and innovation. She has published a number of scientific papers at premier international journals and conferences and has been the principle investigator of a number of ICT and cybersecurity-related R&D projects funded by national, European and international funding programmes. (https://www.ouc.ac.cy/index.php/en/profiles/98-eliana-stavrou).