Pan-University Research Theme on Digital Resilience

The University of Surrey is uniquely positioned to lead nationally and internationally on the emerging area of digital resilience. Building on our strengths in cybersecurity, space systems, critical infrastructure, and interdisciplinary collaboration, we are uniting our faculties to address the resilience of digital systems that underpin society, industry and national security.

Our vision

Creating a community equipped to build resilience into our increasingly vulnerable and interconnected world.

Our drive

A shared ambition to make a game-changing impact by working with industry and government to tackle challenges across critical infrastructure sectors.

Objectives

Secure major grants and deliver field-shaping outputs
Support early career researchers and expand our doctoral training
Strengthen our UK and international collaborations
Position Surrey as a national and international leader in digital resilience.

Building on our cross-university strengths

We already have a number of pan-university centres and institutes finding solutions to challenging real-world problems.

Surrey Centre for Cyber Security

Leading a new Doctoral Training Centre on Digital Resilience for Critical National Infrastructure.

Surrey Space Institute

Addressing the resilience within space research and space-enabled services.

A child looks at a globe. Digital representations of information appear over the top

Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence

Addressing the resilience of people using AI and the resilience of AI itself.

Are you ReDI?

Building resilience in digitalised critical infrastructure

The ReDI Collaboration (Resilience for Digitalised Critical Infrastructure) is a joint academic and industry initiative across a range of disciplines, to carry out advanced research in building security and resilience in a digitalised world.

The collaboration is academically led by ourselves here at Surrey and the University of Strathclyde, and the founder industry members are BAESystems, National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Qinetiq and Thales.

A cohort-based PhD programme is run jointly between Surrey and Strathclyde with support from industry partners. Find out more about the programme.

ReDI research is driven by the major challenges associated with achieving resilience in critical infrastructure systems, maintaining their ability to function across digital, physical and human aspects in the face of change, disruption and attack. This is a multi-faceted agenda covering many aspects of resilience-building, including:

Resilience-by-design
Understanding, modelling and managing complexity
Planning for uncertainty, known current risks and future risks, including climate change)
Cyber resilience
Trustworthiness and measurement
The use of data, digital tools and Al.

Current projects

These projects are exploring digital resilience from diverse disciplinary perspectives across our three faculties. Please contact the project leads for more information.

Multimodal AI Resilience (Andrew Gilbert, Roula Nezi)
Axiomatic Digital Twins (Martin Barrere Cambrun, Tanmoy Chatterjee, Justina Li)
Digital Resilience in New Parents (Zsofia Zavecz, Tamas Foldes)
Authentic Authorship in the Age of AI (Alexandra Grandison)
AI Trust and Adoption for Critical Infrastructure (Tan Sui, Shi Tracy Xu, Bin Zhu)
Agentic Cyber-Resilience for Unmanned Vehicles (Frank Guerin, Simon Hadfield)
TwinRes (Lei Xing).

Theme leads

Professor Ioana Boureanu

Professor in Secure Systems & Head of Surrey Centre for Cyber Security (SCCS)

I am a Professor in Secure Systems at University of Surrey. I am the director of Surrey Centre for Cyber Security.My research focuses on (automatic) analysis of security using mainly logic-based formalisms, as well as on provable security and applied cryptography.I obtained my PhD in formal verification of security protocols from Imperial College London (2011), ...

Professor Steve Schneider

Professor of Secure Systems

I am Professor in Secure Systems and a member of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security (SCCS) within the Computer Science Research Centre at the University of Surrey.I have twice been the Head of Computer Science (2004-2010, and 2022-2026), and was the Associate Dean Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences from 2015-2019. I was ...