Fordham University has been awarded two new federal grants from the National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Defense (DoD) to support cybersecurity core curricula development and cybersecurity capacity building. The principal investigator of both grants is Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., the director of the Fordham Center for Cybersecurity (FCC).
The grants come months after the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security designated Fordham as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education (CAE-CDE).
The $150,000 cybersecurity curricula development grant aims to develop core programming that will be publicly available for educational institutions that are interested in educating graduates to fill cybersecurity positions in the federal government. The grant will also aid in the development of advanced courses that promote cybersecurity education and research.
The second grant is a capacity building grant of $120,000, which is part of the DoD Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP). The project, which has already commenced, focuses on building a hands-on lab environment for cybersecurity training with hardware and software setup for several cybersecurity areas— from penetration testing to intrusion detection and wireless security.
This will satisfy the hands-on requirements for critical Knowledge Units (KUs) for the CAE-CDE /Two-Year Education (CAE-2Y) and Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations (CAE-CO).
Hayajneh said the developed hands-on exercises will be made available online and will improve the volume of Fordham cybersecurity programs for future scholarship and service grants.
“We aspire to lead in cybersecurity and become a gold-standard program for cybersecurity education seekers,” he said.
