I am a part of the new SHURE-Grid fellowship, my cohort is my team of 4 out of the entire group. My team consists of Evan Wang, Shanker Pillai, and Kameren Jouhal. The biggest thing I would like to learn about is the energy grid and Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE), and how these two subjects intertwine. This topic is very important because securing the energy grid from cyber attacks that will cause harm such as blackouts or energy spikes is a growing concern as adversaries become stronger and adaptive. CIE comes into play because it is the way cyber security will be in the future. CIE offers a cheaper and more secure option for cyber security.

There are some similarities and differences in work between my cohort’s project and other peoples. For starters, just between the 2 cohorts in the SHURE-Grid fellowship, the main difference is my cohort is aiming to justify the use of CIE, while the other group is looking to analyze the trade-offs of CIE. The topic is different, and some ways of researching are different, but ultimately we both are doing it rather similarly. Both groups are interviewing people to gain more insight, and also read articles and participate in similar exercises.

The differences between my project and people outside of SHURE-Grid are vast. First off, a lot of the topics are completely different. Some people are researching things in the field of neuroscience, biology, and history. The methods of research are also different. My research is less experiment based, while others involve labs and other tests.

I found almost every project interesting, but the ones that caught my attention the most were the ones regarding neuroscience. I have a strong interest in neuroscience (of course after Cybersecurity) for I have always found the brain to be very fascinating.

A benefit with working with people from different disciplines is you get to hear many different approaches and points of view. A lot of the time, when discussing schoolwork with people sharing similar disciplines, you hear a lot of the same opinions and ways to do something. Broad disciplines allow for different information to be shared. This leads into another benefit, which is that I have learned a lot of new things from these different disciplines. There is really only one obstacle, which is that information is not always understood without explanation across disciplines. Some things someone else believes is basic or common knowledge is unheard of by a different discipline, and vice versa.