Charles Harry Awarded a Maryland Innovation Grant

iSchool News - August 7, 2020

Dr. Harry will use the grant to create a web application for his cybersecurity framework that provides an analytic approach to assessing risk.

headshot of Charles Harry

University of Maryland College of Information Studies (UMD iSchool) Associate Research Professor, Charles Harry, was awarded a $115K Maryland Innovation Grant (MII) to create a web application of the cybersecurity framework he developed that will allow governments and businesses to model risk to their enterprise and critical infrastructure sector.

The cybersecurity framework developed by Dr. Harry provides an analytic approach to assessing cybersecurity risk – including the ability to categorize and measure the impact of cyber events. Using graph analytic methods in a complex systems framework, the application allows users to model the interdependent human processes and their dependent technologies that perform the core functions of their organization. These systems can be further connected to model sector risk. This approach allows for emergent risk to be captured in complex systems that currently present a gap in the field.

Dr. Harry holds a joint appointment with the UMD School of Public Policy. He is the director of operations at the UMD Maryland Global Initiative in Cybersecurity and a senior research associate at the UMD Center for International and Security Studies at the School of Public Policy. He is also part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Cyber Advisory Panel, has regularly appeared before congressional committees to provide testimony, and is an active consultant to a wide range of public and private organizations.

The Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII) was created as a partnership between the State of Maryland and five Maryland academic research institutions (Johns Hopkins University; Morgan State University; University of Maryland, Baltimore; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; University of Maryland, College Park). The program is designed to promote commercialization of research conducted in the partnership universities and leverage each institution’s strengths.

Click here to learn more about MII Grants.