Virginia Franqueira adds her expertise to cyber security at Kent

Virginia Franqueira

Dr Virginia Franqueira has joined the University of Kent as a Lecturer in the School of Computing. Virginia will be a member of the Cyber Security Research Group and a core member of the Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security (KirCCS) and will be based at the Canterbury campus.

Crucially, Virginia will also work for Kent’s ‘super centre‘ of research, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Cyber Security and Conflict (SoCyETAL). SoCyETAL will have a dedicated physical space on campus allowing researchers from different schools and disciplines to work together.

Virginia joins Kent from the University of Derby where she was a senior lecturer in Computer Security and Digital Forensics and led Master’s and undergraduate programmes related to cyber security and digital forensics. Prior to that, she was a lecturer in Computing at the University of Central Lancashire, an information security consultant, and a post-doc researcher at the University of Twente, Netherlands.

Virginia completed her PhD in Computer Science (Security – multi-step attacks in networks) at the University of Twente. She also holds an MSc in Combinatorial Optimization from the Federal University of Espirito Santo, Brazil and a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education from the University of Derby.

Dr Franqueira’s research interests in Digital Forensics span across cybercrime investigation, reconstruction, incident response, and visual content analysis using Machine Learning. In terms of cyber security, Virginia’s interests lay in cyber security engineering (especially requirements engineering), assessment (e.g., insider threat, IoT security, security of connected & automated vehicles) and management (especially in business networks and computer networks). She is very keen in interdisciplinary research addressing practical problems in those domains.

Virginia has published numerous papers and articles in international peer-reviewed – good quality – venues, e.g., the Digital Investigation journal (Elsevier), the IEEE Access journal, and the Journal of Systems and Software (Elsevier). She is actively involved in scholarly activities such as in the organisation of workshops (e.g., WSDF 2015-2019, IoT-SECFOR 2017-2019), in guest editing special issues (e.g., for the IEEE Internet-of-Things journal), and in membership of technical programme committees (e.g., IEEE IDS 2019, BPM 2019, TrustCom (Forensic track) 2016-2018).

Virginia said, ‘I am very proud to be part of a centre of excellence in cyber security! I am looking forward to engage in collaborative research with such a strong group and be able to develop my research further.’

Professor Shujun Li, Director of KirCCS and Co-Director of SoCyETAL, said, ‘I am excited to see Virginia joining the Centre and the Institute. Her rich research expertise in digital forensics and cybercrime will significantly strengthen our research profile in these two important areas, particularly for extending our collaboration with other schools such as Kent Law School and School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research.’