Biography
Dr Nick Pitropakis is an Associate Professor of cybersecurity at the School of Computing of Edinburgh Napier University, and a Fellow of the HEA. He is also a core member of the Blockpass Identity Lab. Dr Pitropakis has a strong research background in attacks against machine learning. His current research interests include adversarial machine learning, trust and privacy using distributed ledger technology, advanced cyber attack attribution, and data science applied to cyber security and IoT device security. Dr Pitropakis is leading the integrated apprenticeship scheme BSc Cyber Security, which is the first in the UK to receive full NCSC accreditation. He is teaching Cyber-related graduate apprenticeship degrees, both running in Scotland and England. He is also the external examiner of The American College in Greece (ACG), covering the BSc (Hons) Information Technology and BSc (Hons) Cyber Security and Networking programmes provided by The Open University, and the Lead External Examiner for MSc Cyber Security (Newcastle and London campuses) of Northumbria University.
Dr Pitropakis is currently leading the Horizon Europe project Trust and Privacy-Preserving Computing Platform for Crossborder Federation of Personal Data (TRUSTEE). Prior to joining ENU in 2016, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was involved in a U.S. Department of Defense project (Methods for producing standardized and transparent attribution) worth 17.3 million dollars aiming at advanced attribution of malicious parties. His work has impacted major trademark holders and especially average users, whose awareness was increased against combosquatting abuse.
His recent work has included £310,843 for the EU TRUSTEE project and over £300,000 through Edinburgh Napier’s latest spinout TRUEDEPLOY. Dr Pitropakis has established synergies around the UK with other centres of excellence in cyber security like Royal Holloway and the University of Lancaster. Additionally, he has been working with leading European and international partners such as Fraunhofer, Panasonic, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Ericsson Nikola Tesla to name a few.
Based on the outcomes of these projects, Dr Pitropakis has published 60 quality scholarly articles. His research has been awarded multiple times and recently one of his projects as well as his last PhD graduate won the Scottish Cyber Awards. Dr Pitropakis has also been invited to serve as an organizing and program committee member of major international conferences and as an editor for prestigious journals. In addition, Dr Pitropakis has been involved in supervising Research MSc and PhD students since he accomplished his PhD in 2015. Currently, Dr Pitropakis is supervising 2 PhD students, and their research activities are being disseminated in high-quality conferences and journals. His latest PhD graduate Dr Pavlos Papadopoulos is leading the ENU spinout TRUEDEPLOY.