The 2021 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award has been awarded to Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Elisa Bertino (Purdue University), “For advancing the security and privacy of new-generation cellular networks!”

Elisa Bertino is Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. She serves as Director of the Purdue Cyberspace Security Lab (Cyber2Slab). In her role as Director of Cyber2SLab she leads multi-disciplinary research in data security and privacy. Prior to joining Purdue, she was a professor and department head at the Department of Computer Science and Communication of the University of Milan. She has been a visiting researcher at the IBM Research Laboratory (now Almaden) in San Jose, at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, at Rutgers University, at Singapore Management University. Her main research interests include security, privacy, database systems, distributed systems, and sensor networks. Her recent research focuses on cybersecurity and privacy of cellular networks and IoT systems, and edge analytics and machine learning for cybersecurity. Elisa Bertino is a Fellow member of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS. She received the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for “For outstanding contributions to database systems and database security and advanced data management systems”, the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for “Pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems”, and the 2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer Award.

The IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure award recognizes “significant technological achievements and contributions to the establishment, development, and proliferation of innovative societal infrastructure systems through the application of information technology with an emphasis on distributed computing systems.”

Learn more about the award here.