Selcuk Uluagac Wins IEEE Outstanding Engineering Educator Award

FIU Eminent Scholar Chaired Associate Professor Selcuk Uluagac has won the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Region 3 Joseph M. Biedenbach Outstanding Engineering Educator Award. 

The honor recognizes a member of Region 3 (the southeastern U.S. and Jamaica) who has made an outstanding contribution to the electrotechnology student population, sharing technical and professional abilities through teaching in industry, government or an institution of higher learning. 

With more than 486,000 members across nearly 200 countries, the IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization. 

"Receiving the IEEE award is a profound honor, particularly because nurturing the next generation of leaders in this field holds deep significance for me," Uluagac says. "I take pride in the exceptional work taking place in our lab facilities and classrooms at FIU, and in witnessing the meaningful impact our students are making as they carry this work into the world." 

Uluagac is director of the Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab at FIU's College of Engineering & Computing (CEC), where he leads a team of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in the development of new tools to protect the security and privacy of smart devices and technologies.  

He has closely mentored more than 80 students at all levels — postdoctoral, Ph.D., master’s, undergraduate and high school — 22 of whom have received prestigious awards under his guidance. His graduates now work at Google, Amazon Smart Home, HBO, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, The MITRE Corporation, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 

The CEC professor has established multiple workforce and educational initiatives as well as cybersecurity scholarships that have trained hundreds of students and professionals in critical cybersecurity competencies.  He also serves as director of CIERTA, a technical hub for cybersecurity and privacy-related interdisciplinary research, innovation, and education within FIU. 

The FIU professor’s research focuses on practical applications in cybersecurity and privacy. His pioneering research contributions have advanced the security and privacy foundations of smart technologies, spanning cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things — affecting modern life across homes, offices, cities and critical infrastructure.  

Uluagac’s prior work has received funding through numerous government agencies and industry since joining FIU in 2014, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Air Force Research Lab, the U.S. Department of Labor, Google, Microsoft and Cisco. 

"This prestigious honor speaks to Dr. Uluagac's remarkable ability to bridge cutting-edge research with transformative education. His leadership in establishing CIERTA and advancing cybersecurity innovation at FIU has positioned our college at the forefront of a field that is vital to our national security and economic future. We are incredibly proud of this achievement," says Interim Dean of the College of Engineering & Computing Ines R. Triay. 

Uluagac also serves as the deputy editor-in-chief of IEEE TIFS (Transactions on Information Forensics and Security) and served in other similar premier, peer-reviewed journals. He has also served on the technical committees of top-tier cybersecurity conferences such as Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) and the USENIX Security Symposium. 

The award represents the latest recognition for the FIU professor. In 2023, he was the recipient of the FIU President’s Council Real Triumphs Award and the Faculty Senate Research Excellence Award. He has received Provost Top Scholar Awards for significant grants, student learning success and the quality of his mentoring and research. In the past, he was also a recipient of an NSF CAREER and Google's ASPIRE Research Awards. 

Uluagac will accept the award at the Region 3 Awards Dinner in March in Huntsville, Alabama.