Ryan Ko

Professor Ryan Ko is Chair and Director of UQ Cyber and a member of the Academic Board at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Dr Ko has held senior scientific leadership, executive, and directorship roles across industry and academia, and has more than a decade of board, governance and advisory experience across government, industry and NGOs across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and USA.

He was director of the New Zealand Institute for Security and Crime Science (NZISCS), Cyber Security Researchers of Waikato (CROW), and founding chairman of the Data Privacy Foundation.

He established New Zealand’s first cyber security research programme at the University of Waikato in 2012, and serves as board member and expert adviser to organisations including the NZX-listed LIC, INTERPOL, New Zealand and Tongan governments.

Dr Ko is principal investigator of the MBIE-funded NZD12.2 mil STRATUS project, and co-established the NZ Cyber Security Challenge since 2014. Dr Ko publishes extensively in cyber security, focusing on returning data control to users through provenance, homomorphic encryption, cloud computing security and data privacy. He is series editor for Elsevier’s security books, and currently serves as the editor of ISO/IEC 21878 – Security guidelines in design and implementation of virtualised servers, representing Singapore’s IT Standards Committee.

A Fellow of Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), he is a co-creator of the (ISC)2 CCSP certification – the gold-standard international cloud security professional certification.

Prior to academia, he was a HP Labs lead computer scientist leading innovations in HP global security products. He received his PhD and BEng(Computer Engineering)(Hons) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.