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George Mason University will soon offer a new doctoral degree in cybersecurity engineering, a milestone reflecting both the rapid evolution of the cybersecurity field and the continued growth of the university's Department of Cyber Security Engineering (CYSE). The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) approved the new PhD program in July.
"This is not just an administrative accomplishment," said CYSE Chair Paulo Cesar Costa. "It is an important recognition of the strength, maturity, and future direction of our department. It marks a major step forward in our ability to educate students in cybersecurity with the engineering depth and systems perspective that define CYSE."
He said, “The main challenge we faced with SCHEV was that we had to explain how cybersecurity was already a discipline of its own.” He points to the history of computer science as a useful comparison. Decades ago, computer science existed within electrical engineering before technological advances created the need for dedicated departments and schools. "We were able to convince SCHEV that the new discipline is actually overdue already."
As society becomes increasingly dependent on internet-connected devices, automated systems, and artificial intelligence (AI), the field is expanding beyond defending computer networks. "Cybersecurity includes a lot more than just hacking computers. There's the human factor, there's policymaking, there's how we train people. And now with the advent of AI, it basically turned around all the knowledge that we had about cybersecurity."
Cyberattacks that once required months of planning by highly skilled teams can now be executed far more quickly using AI agents, while researchers are already seeing examples of AI systems exploiting vulnerabilities in other AI systems.
"Cybersecurity and AI are no longer adjacent problems,” said Amarda Shehu, vice president and chief AI officer for the university. “AI supplies new defenses and new attack surfaces, and that demands researchers trained in engineering depth rather than in tools that expire. George Mason has been at the forefront of cybersecurity engineering for years, and this doctorate is the next step—producing those researchers at a public university whose obligation is to widen access to such expertise."
Costa said, "The whole discipline is evolving so fast that if we don't focus on this and get prepared, it's not that the CYSE department is not going to succeed. It's that the country will not have the capable cybersecurity professionals it needs."
For Costa, the PhD program is the latest step in a journey that began more than a decade ago. "When the cybersecurity department was created, it was created in a very unconventional way," he said. "It was created as a result of our own success in the bachelor's program."
The bachelor's degree launched in 2015 as a standalone academic program, with courses taught by faculty from other departments; enrollment quickly exceeded expectations. "It exploded in success," Costa said. "When it crossed 400 students, the dean's office created a new department."
The department later added a master's program, but Costa knew that “any department seeking to be known for its excellence has to have its own PhD program."
By 2023, he believed the department had the necessary infrastructure. "When I became chair, I allocated a lot of resources to start that program; it requires a lot more than just one guy writing stuff," Costa said.
Costa credited CYSE Professor Zhengdao Wang and Assistant Professor Tanvir Arafin for their extensive work developing and refining the proposal.
Wang said the program is designed to educate the next generation of cybersecurity experts. "We have an interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes security by design, integrates AI throughout the curriculum and research, and prepares graduates to address emerging challenges. The program will translate fundamental discoveries into practical solutions while strengthening the cybersecurity workforce and research enterprise.”
The college will implement a recruitment plan for the program soon, and it will be listed on the University Catalog in the near future.