Dr Chitra Balakrishna

Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security

Chitra Balakrishna, Ph.D. MBCS, SFHEA , CEH is an academic, author, futuristic technology and open source enthusiast with over 20 years of experience spanning across academia and industry in the areas of Cyber Security, Data Networking, Mobile Communications,Technologies and Applications.
She has been instrumental in acquiring research income of over £2 million as a co-investigator or principal investigator from funding sources such as ERDF, Innovate UK, HEA, EPSRC and British Council. She has over 40 academic publications to her credit in international journals and conference proceedings. In addition, she has authored a highly cited book on 'IP Multimedia Subsystem ' by John Wiley publications.
She is currently the Program Leader for Cyber Security at Open University. She has previously held position of program leader for Networking, Security and Forensics at Edge Hill University and Head of Networks and Services with Centre of Excellence for Mobile Applications and Services. During her tenure as an academic member of staff at the University of South Wales, she set up an open source next-generation networking (NGN) lab in collaboration with industrial partners such as Orange and France Telecom. She is a founding member of a very successful IEEE conference on Next-Generation Applications, Technologies and services which ran for 12 editions and a chair for an IEEE sponsored workshop on Smart Cities for 5 years.

Recent Research Grants ( 2015-2020)

Source: Nesta CareerTech Challenge Fund
Project Title: Gamified Intelligent Cyber Aptitude and Skills Training (GICAST)
Duration: 12 months (starting 1st May 2020)
Investigator(s): Dr. C Balakrishna and Dr P.Charlton
Total Value: £240,000 (£240K)

Source: Cyber ASAP Program, Innovate UK
Project Title: A Gamified Intelligent Environment for Training and Assessing Cyber Security Behaviour
Duration: 4 months (starting 1st April 2019)
Investigator(s): Dr. C Balakrishna and Dr P.Charlton, Prof. Shailey Manukha
Total Value: £28,000(£28K)

Source: Joint Academic Development Centres Grant Department of Business Energy And Industrial Strategy
Project Title: Cyber Security for IoT Based Healthcare Application (UK-Gulf Partnership)
Duration: 12 months (starting 1st March 2018)
Investigator(s): Dr. C Balakrishna (Edge Hill University) and Dr. Wael El-madany(University of Bahrain)
Total Value: £40,000 (£40K)

Source: Higher Education Academy
Project Title: CyberGaTE: A Gamified Virtual Training Environment for Cyber-Security http://www.cyberedge.uk
Duration: 18 months (starting 1st November 2016)
Investigator(s): Dr. C Balakrishna, Prof.Romano and Dr. James Coleman
Total Value: £80,000 (£80K)

Keywords

cyber security, Internet of Things, cyber security education, gamification, game-based learning, Consumer IoT, healthcare

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Publications