ÐÔ¸£ÎåÔÂÌì

Dr. Gurkan is currently a Professor at ÐÔ¸£ÎåÔÂÌì University’s College of Aeronautics and Engineering where she leads the Computer Engineering Technology and Cybersecurity Engineering programs. In addition, she is the director and Point of Contact of the National Center for Academic Excellence for Cyber Defense (NCAE-CD) and the Ohio Cyber Range Regional Programming Center at ÐÔ¸£ÎåÔÂÌì University. She has over 20 years of experience in software-defined networking (SDN), testbed infrastructures, sensor systems, and cybersecurity.

 

Over the course of her career, she has authored over 85 journal and conference papers and has served as Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on multiple major research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), collectively totaling several million dollars in funding. She served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement from 2009 to 2017, and has held leadership roles in organizing prominent conferences, including as Technical Program Chair for the software-defined networking track of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN). She is regularly invited to serve on review panels for funding agencies such as the NSF and DOE and has delivered invited talks and participated in expert panels at various academic and industry venues. She is the founding faculty advisor of ÐÔ¸£ÎåÔÂÌì University .

 

Her research lab at the ÐÔ¸£ÎåÔÂÌì University has an established direct network connectivity to the nationwide testbeds, the , , and advanced software and virtualized testbed capabilities to launch sophisticated cyber competition and network security infrastructure for research and education.

Dr. Gurkan teaches in the Cybersecurity Engineering program. She developed and continues to maintain the course content for the following courses:

In addition, she is responsible for guiding and content evaluations of the students in the Cybersecurity Engineering program when they enroll in the engineering capstone course, / Engineering Capstone, in collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Kwasa. She works with local industry and the IT security team at the ÐÔ¸£ÎåÔÂÌì University in determination of real-life projects for the students capstone design projects.

Dr. Gurkan conducts research at the intersection of networked system design and cybersecurity policy enforcement. She translates business requirements into cybersecurity controls in an engineering system with data flow definitions. Her software-defined infrastructure testbed is the underlying experimental platform that she utilizes to run what-if scenarios of spoofed data injections, eavesdropping, resiliency of data flow attacks, as well as confidentiality breaches. She develops innovative protocols and methods that mitigate risk while calculating the feasibility costs in order to better inform industry and federal agencies on cybersecurity governance, risk management, and compliance while providing value on cost-benefit return on investment. Some notable publications include:

Her lab has a rich set of instructional tools that are MPL 2.0 licensed open source repositories hosted on GitLab. More information on her research projects and links, please visit her . You can also explore Dr. Gurkan’s research publications on or connect with her on .