Professor Alastair Irons examines cybersecurity education, skills development, and partnerships to tackle the skills gap.
Speaker
Professor Alastair Irons
Agenda
18:30 - Event start and talk from Professor Alastair Irons
19:30 - Q&A
19:45 - Event close
Synopsis
In this talk Professor Alastair Irons will look at the cybersecurity ecosystem from an educational perspective and how to address the cybersecurity skills gap. He will discuss the opportunities to provide cybersecurity education for all and how to enable that. He will provide a view on how to address challenges in cybersecurity education (what to include on a cyber syllabus, who to teach it and how to engage prospective students) and how to raise the profile of cybersecurity as a subject domain.
Also included in the discussion on the challenges in cybersecurity education Professor Alastair Irons will look at ways to develop cybersecurity professionals. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the concept of partnerships in the cybersecurity ecosystem and an examination on how partnerships can strengthen the cybersecurity environment.
About the speaker
Alastair Irons is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science. He has recently retired as Deputy Principal and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Abertay University in Scotland and has established a small consultancy and is a Director of the CIO Mirror CIC. Before coming to Abertay in July 2022 he was Academic Director for Digital Education at the University of Sunderland, having previously been the Dean for the Faculty of Technology. Prior to joining the University of Sunderland in 2008 he worked at ONE North East, Northumbria University and ICI.
Alastair became a National Teaching Fellow in 2010. Alastair was a visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town in South Africa from 2013 – 2017 and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, at the British University in Egypt and at the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean. His research interests focus on digital inclusion, digital education and digital pedagogies, but also on digital forensics and cybersecurity.
His current research includes digital skills frameworks for students and academics, digital skills for all and digital poverty, as well as cybersecurity in the classroom and learning safely in the classroom of the future. Alastair has over 20 refereed journal publications and has over 40 conference papers in the last 5 years. His recent book publications include a book on assessment and feedback in 2025 and an anthology of issues in higher education in a post covid world in 2022.
Alastair was Vice President (academic) of the BCS and is chair of the BCS Academy board from 2020 to 2026 and is a founding trustee of the BCS Foundation. He is also currently the UK representative on IFIP and serves on the IFIP Board.
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This event is brought to you by: Cheltenham and Gloucester branch
