Professor Alan Woodward

Professor Alan Woodward is an internationally recognised cyber security expert, advisor, and academic, specialising in cyber security, covert communications, digital forensics, cryptography, and steganography.

Alan trained first as a physicist, but a fascination with computing — sparked by signal-processing work on gamma-ray burst detectors — drew him into engineering. After undergraduate study in physics and postgraduate research in adaptive filtering and signal recovery at the University of Southampton's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, he spent many years in UK government service. His work there spanned developing novel computing systems including signals interception and, increasingly, understanding how adversaries penetrate secure systems — and how to penetrate theirs. It is this hands-on, real-world grounding that shapes his teaching and research today.

Moving into the private sector, Alan held senior roles in the IT industry, serving as Chief Technology Officer of Charteris, which he helped build from a start-up to a flotation on the London Stock Exchange in 2000. He remains a director of technology businesses, and continues to advise government and private-sector organisations as an independent consultant — including as an advisor to Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3).

As a Visiting Professor at Surrey, Alan teaches and mentors undergraduate and MSc students, favouring practical labs — from penetration testing to network analysis — over purely theoretical instruction, and pressing students to communicate their findings as clearly as they write their code. He works with the National Cyber Security Centre on how the profession should train, certify, and grow the expertise the field urgently needs.

Alan is also one of the UK's most visible and trusted cyber security commentators. He writes for outlets including Scientific American and contributes across the national press — among them The Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph — as well as broadcast and international media, including the BBC and Sky. Known for explaining complex threats in plain, engaging terms, he is a frequent first port of call for journalists covering major security stories. His contributions to the field have seen him elected a Fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Physics, and the Royal Statistical Society; he is also a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Physicist, Chartered IT Practitioner, and European Engineer (EUR ING).