RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

I joined the first Royal Holloway CDT cohort in September 2013 following careers in the RAF, police and private sector. Having spent 10 years working in security and intelligence I was attracted to a move into academia by the increasing relevance of cyberspace to the field of security, a desire to expose myself to a different perspective and a growing thirst to learn. Traditional PhDs were available but the Cyber Security PhD at Royal Holloway offered something different; a truly multidisciplinary approach, with a close connection between Geopolitics and Information Security; the chance to take classes as well as conduct research; a close connection to the real world through industrial placements; and a cohort environment where we had others around us to learn from, help us out and reassure us that we weren’t as far behind as we thought we were. I began with no clear idea of my research area but soon realised that there was one topic which both interested me and animated the InfoSec

I came to the CDT almost as the token non-technical person in my cohort. With an academic background in War Studies I thought I was going to o ccupy a small nic he in cyber security separate from computer science and mathematics. I was partially right, but also very wrong. Sure, my previous knowledge was different from most other students, but instead of working in isolation from more technical colleagues I found that their skills and experiences e nrich ed my own work and i n turn I was able to enrich theirs – I hope! Cyber security truly is an interdisciplinary subject and for me the CDT offered an ideal environment to both appreciate and embr ace this. My research journey was unlike anything I could have envisaged – indeed, I am still not entirely convinced I did a PhD. My thesis emerged from my summer project investigating cyber wargaming, which had just been intended as an exploratory foray into something different and fun, but quickly grew into something much more substantial