Women Leaders inspire fellow women aspiring to break stereotypes and chase their dreams. When these intellectual leaders take leadership roles in the educational domain, they take charge of crafting an educational set-up that promotes the upliftment of society by encouraging young minds to explore, learn, and excel in the academic domain.

These leaders make great efforts to elevate their schools to the highest level of academic achievement. They hold the power to create an inclusive learning environment that cares for every student’s special academic needs. They utilize the resources provided by the education programmes and communities sustainably to nurture wholesome development at the school.

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Founders Chair Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas, Dallas, is an inspirational personality who upholds patience and vision throughout her career journey. She has abundant knowledge and efficiency, with which she has successfully brought progressive transformations in the educational realm.

The Journey towards Success

After completing her undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, at age 20, Dr. Bhavani’s journey began in 1975. Since her father had died four years earlier when she was only sixteen, her maternal uncle had insisted that she get married before starting graduate school in the United Kingdom or the United States.

Fortunately, her husband was finishing his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Cambridge in England, and her uncle arranged her marriage. She completed her final exam shortly before her marriage in April 1975, moved to England with her spouse, and enrolled at the University of Bristol for her graduate studies.

As opportunities expanded after receiving her Ph.D., she and her family moved to the US. Her husband got a position at the Petroleum Recovery Research Centre in Socorro, New Mexico. She received an offer from New Mexico Tech to become a tenure track assistant professor of computer science. When her son was a baby, she declined and accepted a job as a visiting professor instead. After a year, the family moved to Minneapolis, where she worked at the University of Minnesota for two years.

After that, she entered the private sector, working as a Senior Software Developer at Control Data Corporation and subsequently as a Principal Research Scientist at Honeywell. She began working in cyber security and data science at Honeywell and also as an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota. Once more, the family relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, where she worked for 13 years at a Federal Lab called the MITRE Corporation and also took on a position as an adjunct professor at Boston University and continued her work in cyber security and data science.

After spending three years as a Programme Director at the National Science Foundation in Washington DC while on assignment from MITRE, she joined the University of Texas at Dallas as a tenured professor in October 2004. She committed herself fully to academia in Texas, pursuing a career in academic research and teaching.

Determination to Illuminate the World with Education

Dr. Bhavani is a big advocate of lifelong learning. She, therefore, taught cyber security and data science to a global community in conjunction with learning new subjects. While waiting for a visa to immigrate to the US, she began teaching high school students in the UK. She imparted knowledge to US audiences through seminars and lectures, including in the commercial industry, the US government agencies, and university students. She did this from 1980 until 2004 until she started working full-time in academia.

Her greatest passion is teaching students. She has trained students worldwide, including at the University of Dschang in Cameroon, Africa. Through teaching others, she gained even more knowledge in computer science and various communities’ approaches to education. She genuinely appreciates the opportunity to pursue her passion for educating people.

A Proficient Educator

Dr. Bhavani claims that teaching cybersecurity and data science to her students is her primary objective. She also gives motivational speeches to keep them from giving up when they have trouble finding work. For example, she discusses how learning is a continuous process throughout one’s life and what tools and technologies people can use to stay highly competitive in the workforce.

She also gives them advice never to give up. They will succeed eventually even if they don’t get what they want immediately if they work hard and have self-confidence. She discusses the importance of having a mentor and offers first-hand accounts of her experiences. According to her, one needs a solid support system to thrive in the workplace. She gives equal weight to the theoretical and practical facets when instructing her students.

For the systems they design, they must offer a theoretical foundation. But their priority needs to be developing usable and efficient systems. For her students, these methods have proven to be effective.

A Caring Leader

The happiness and motivation of her team members are Dr. Bhavani’s main priority. In other words, don’t force the pupils to produce something they are not passionate about. She informs them of the importance of work-life balance. The phrase “work-life balance” has been derided by some. On the other hand, having a calm home is necessary for academic success. Similarly, having issues at work prevents one from having a peaceful home. For this reason, any problem that a student has must be resolved right away cannot be allowed to fester.

Dr. Bhavani explained how she juggled work and school while focusing on marriage, motherhood, and now grandmotherhood. It’s not simple. At every stage, trade-offs need to be made. She tries her best to listen to and advise her students, emphasizing that each person is unique and that giving their best effort rather than competing with one another is essential.

She tells them that she evaluates her performance for the day before going to bed, asking herself if she did her best and what she could have done better each night. As it has been said, “Tomorrow is another day.” Going back to her objectives, she wants to create a work environment where individuals are inspired to perform to the best of their abilities.

Sailing through the Challenges

Dr. Bhavani has encountered several challenges in her career. Highly qualified students are what the University of Texas at Dallas most definitely needs. Given that every university vies for the best students, it is challenging. These students go on to work in academia, industry, and government after producing outstanding research and learning some of the newest technologies. To keep the institute’s reputation intact, they need to do an excellent job at what they do.

This motivates Dr. Bhavani and her group to hire more gifted pupils. They also make use of personal connections. For instance, many team members recruit students from the home universities where they completed their undergraduate degrees and find the best candidates from these schools. To hire the top students, they network at conferences as well. They can recruit students from different universities across the world in this way. Dr. Bhavani and her team require a varied group of students, each bringing their unique talent and creative ideas to ensure everyone succeeds and produces work of a higher caliber.

Working with a few somewhat difficult coworkers has been another personal challenge in her career. It was early in her career when this occurred. She was fortunately assisted in overcoming this obstacle by an excellent mentor. This experience made her more determined, and in a way, she thanks her critics because these setbacks have helped her succeed more in her career.

According to her, no two people are alike, which presents a challenge in the classroom. Students come from different countries and backgrounds, each with its own culture. Her job is to motivate the students to give it their all. She tries to meet with students as often as possible if they want to, even though having 80 students in her class makes it difficult to provide them with individualized instruction. She wants to avoid pressuring them. To help them understand the problems, she also provides feedback on their performance early in the semester.

She also provides the students with links to other resources to learn more. She is aware that some students experience anxiety before exams. She thus assigns them take-home tests and warns them that cheating will result in a report. They are encouraged to perform well when given flexibility while still being held accountable for their work. She also advises them to read as much as possible about the subject to prepare for the take-home exams and answer questions.

She assigns them programming tasks to complete in groups. This is the most productive portion of the course since they enjoy working as a team, which will help them in their future careers. Lastly, she takes them on field trips, like visits to government and industry laboratories, to help them understand what happens in the real world and inspire them to do well.

Contributions in Enhancing Education

Dr. Bhavani was hired by the University of Texas at Dallas as a tenured full professor to found and direct the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute. The resources were limited at that time. So, she had to prioritize. She selected top faculty in certain research areas and started collaborating with them on writing proposals and developing curriculum. She then expanded into more varied research areas in cyber security.

As a result, the University of Texas at Dallas became known as one of the premier institutes in Data and Applications Security and Privacy. Then, she started recruiting talent in systems security, programming language security, cyber-physical systems security, and cryptography. This made the institute a reasonably comprehensive one in cyber security. The most essential constituents are the students at all levels, e.g., BS, MS, and PhD. The institute also established education programs, degrees, and certificates for the students, and Dr. Bhavani and her team try their best to recruit the best and brightest.

The Ph.D. students conduct innovative research to solve the challenging problems in cyber security. She then began collaborating with other colleges in her university, such as social sciences, political sciences, and public policy, and established interdisciplinary research and education programs. The institute is now considered one of the premier institutes in cyber security, and Dr. Bhavani is one of the driving forces in this. In recognition of her hard work, the university promoted her to the Founders Chair Professor in Computer Science and Engineering.

Prestigious Awards and Achievements

Dr. Bhavani is blessed to have won numerous significant awards and fellowships. As a computer scientist, software engineer and scientist, she holds the three most essential fellowships: the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), She is well-known in the innovators community due to her fellowship in the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), headquartered in the United States.

She is also a fellow of numerous other organizations, the British Computer Society being one of the most prominent. She has also won great recognition from associations like the IEEE and ACM, including being awarded the IEEE Computer Society (CS) 2023 Taylor L. Booth Award for Education. She says, “As an educator, I cannot ask for more.”

Additionally, she received the distinguished recognition from the IEEE CS in 1997, the Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award. Additional recognitions include the IEEE CS Technical Committee (TC) Services Computing 2017 Research Innovation Award, the IEEE CS TC Cloud Computing 2022 Women in Cloud Computing Award, the IEEE Communications Society (Comsoc) 2019 Technical Recognition Award, the ACM SIGSAC 2010 Outstanding Contributions Award, and the ACM SIGSAC CODASPY Lasting Research Award. Her work at the nexus of cybersecurity and data science has garnered her almost every prestigious award in this field.

A Visionary Leader

Dr. Bhavani stands out from other educators because she emphasizes an inclusive approach to learning at all levels. One of the most important aspects of her work has been educating a global community through presentations in multiple nations on every continent. Since everyone has access to virtual education these days, the pandemic has allowed her to reach out to countries she otherwise would not have been able to. Additionally, she teaches the general public and K–12 students.

She instructs and guides high school students in summer school at her university, for instance, every summer. To encourage people to practice good cyber hygiene, she also presents talks at the public libraries in her community. She was given the following citation in recognition of her IEEE CS Taylor L. Booth award: “For Outstanding Leadership in Cyber Security Education and Data Science Education as well as Mentorship of Members of Systemically Marginalized Groups.” This quote from IEEE CS sums it all up.