CSU Lands $1.9 Million Grant for Cybersecurity Education
An Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (IC-CAE) will soon become part of the Chicago State University (CSU) campus thanks to a $1.9 million grant from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency ( DIA,) which plans, manage, and execute intelligence operations during peacetime, crisis, and war.
The proposal submitted by CSU professors John Agada, Moussa Ayyash and Gebeyehu Mulugeta, ranked 3rd out of 54 applications that were submitted from U.S. institutions of higher learning.
"At Chicago State University we have some of the most unique, diverse and talented faculty in the nation and they are working on the cutting edge to address some of the most pressing issues of our day, said CSU president, Dr. Wayne Watson. “On behalf of the entire CSU family, we applaud and thank Dr. Agada, Dr. Ayyash and Dr. Mulugeta on all the hard work they put in to obtain this very competitive grant from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Their research will yield multiple positive outcomes not only for our students and the University as a whole but also for cyber security efforts worldwide."
The five year-long grant, one of six national awards will be used to set up IC-CAE and fund the cybersecurity education and research project on the CSU campus.
The objective of the IC-CAE is to prepare intelligence and cybersecurity analysts for service in the public, civic and private sectors, conduct policy-oriented national security research, and deliver public education outreach services to the general public.
Anticipated outcomes include faculty development and expanded curricula offerings in national security studies, increased numbers of minority staff in the Intelligence Community and enhanced security culture in the Chicago-area general public.
In terms of minority participation in the U.S. Intelligence Community, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) sponsored its annual Intelligence Community Women’s Summit at the Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters last month that brought together women and men from across the intelligence community to discuss and promote diversity and inclusion.
“Diversity isn’t just about recruiting and retention,” DIA Deputy Director Doug Wise was quoted saying. “It’s about harnessing those statistics to achieve the complex mission we have,” adding, that the intelligence mission needs a variety of perspectives and experiences that it can use to analyze data and provide insight and advice to the nation’s leaders and warfighters.
CSU’s IC-CAE is expected to be a multidisciplinary program located in Department of Information Studies and operated through interdepartmental team-work.
External collaborators will include national security agencies and Centers of Academic Excellence at other institutions of higher learning in the region.
During fall 2013, CSU initiated an annual conference series on disaster crisis management for its campus and neighborhood communities. The IC-CAE program will augment this community-focused mission by positioning CSU as one of the nation’s top universities for meeting the national security challenges of the 21st Century.
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