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As plans for Mason Square progress, the Cyber Security Engineering (CYSE) department, the fastest growing department in the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), is eager to leverage the space. Home to the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Northern Virginia Node Cyber Living Innovation Lab, Mason Square will house CYSE’s graduate programs
“The bulk of the research that we do happens there,” says department chair Paulo Costa. “It makes sense for us to have both our master's and PhD students having more presence on that campus, and that's going to become even more important after the new building [Fuse] is available to them.”
As CEC’s youngest department and the first to offer a Bachelor of Science in cyber security engineering, CYSE is growing quickly. Associate chair and department founder Peggy S. Brouse estimates that the department gains 10 to 20 percent more students each year.
“This semester, we're graduating 158, and I think probably in the fall we'll get another 200 freshmen coming in, maybe more. I mean, it just doesn’t seem to be ending,” says Brouse.
Dedicated leadership guides the department; Costa and Brouse have known each other for 25 years, having met when Costa was a student in Brouse’s class. Brouse has worked at Mason for 32 years. She co-founded the Systems Engineering and Operations Research department and developed the Cyber Security Engineering degree program from scratch; the bachelor’s in cyber security engineering was the first degree of its kind in the world.
“I had to work with corporations and others to find out what we should offer in this degree. It's a really hard degree—It's 126 credits, and it's very quantitative—but if you can get in it, you're going to make $100,000 going out. So, I'm really proud of it,” says Brouse. Indeed, CYSE has many organizational sponsors in northern Virginia, including various private companies that support specific senior design projects as well as government organizations that support research.
The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI), for example, funds the CCI Northern Virginia Node Cyber Living Innovation Lab at Mason Square, which includes about 4,000 square feet of space dedicated to cybersecurity research, training, and experiential learning. One such cybersecurity test involves the lab's Tormach CNC machine, which carves metal objects according to a given 3D file. As the machine engraves a coin with a word, one team tries to change a single letter of the word while another tries to detect and prevent the attack. Other lab equipment includes a robot that sorts items on a conveyor belt, driving simulation systems, and a high-fidelity digital twin of the Fuse building.
In addition, the Department of Energy funds fourteen innovation institutes, each addressing a specific challenge, Costa explains. Mason Square serves as the east coast headquarters of the DoE's Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII), which provides a large yearly research grant for CYSE research at Mason. Costa, the grant’s principal investigator, notes, “We've been active in the areas of manufacturing of industrial systems and also autonomous vehicles.”