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Salutations, fellow researchers (and Pitt-attendees)! My name’s Isabella, but please call me Bell. I’m an incoming sophomore bioengineer with a prospective neuroscience minor in the Swanson School of Engineering. I’m a part of PRISM and Art History Club on campus, as well as SWE: The Society of Women Engineers, and I adore video games. Strike up a conversation with me about Genshin Impact, or OMORI—I’d love to indulge you.

My research project this summer is focused on cybersecurity in the electricity grid (I’m one of those eight students working as a part of the SHURE-Grid program). My initial motive for joining the program has entirely to do with sustainability, which is still a major interest of mine. I’ve recently come back from the Netherlands, where sustainability is heavily emphasized and firmly embedded in their everyday life. But after a closer look at just what SHURE-Grid entails, I’ve also become interested in cyber-informed engineering (CIE) and how the design process marries into other important STEM fields, like computer science.

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My team and I have decided to tackle the issue of trade-offs in CIE. Delegating resources, risk management, the like. Cybersecurity is incredibly difficult to implement in the power grid at the moment, mainly because the grid is so well-established, and it’s nearly impossible to change a system that has been standing for well over 50 years. Even just a minor change to the grid runs the risk of inconveniencing a significant number of people, which is a risk not many companies are willing to take. What we can do is teach potential stakeholders why cybersecurity is important. Of course, companies are limited in the amount of time, money, and effort they’re able to delegate to cybersecurity, so our team is seeking to establish a set of guidelines—or a standard by which a company can appropriately gauge the amount of risk they’re willing to take, and how to make those tough decisions. 

Trade-offs are incredibly important because they get engineers thinking in different ways on how best to keep their systems safe. Take for example, a pressure vessel that needs to be kept at a certain temperature to maintain a steady state equilibrium of sorts (Gay-Lussac’s Law, anyone?). A cyber attacker could hack the system and cause some damage by tampering with the temperature of the vessel, and while we could invest our resources in building a firewall and coming up with an encryption key in order to prevent those attacks from happening, or we implement a pressure release valve that blows the vessel open when the temperature changes too drastically. One takes significantly more time and effort, and that is precisely what we are trying to address. When thinking about trade-offs, we ask ourselves “how much risk are we willing to take? Can we go about this issue in a smarter way?” That is why trade-offs are so integral to keeping important systems like our energy grid safe. And that’s the essence of our project!

I’m really excited to get to know all of you, so feel free to stop by and strike up a conversation! I’d love to hear all about your projects. Best of luck and I hope your summer goes well. Hope to speak to you soon.