Professor Alan Woodward

Alan Woodward is an engineer and academic specialising in cyber security, covert communications, digital forensics, cryptography and steganography, and an advisor to the public and private sectors on how technology affects policy and business.

He trained as a physicist, but computing caught his imagination in his final year, when his project on gamma-ray bursts required a computer to conduct signal processing. That was still unusual for an undergraduate in the early 1980s. After postgraduate research in adaptive filtering and signal recovery at the University of Southampton, he spent many years in UK government service, including intelligence work during the Cold War. A self-confessed useless builder, he discovered his real talent was for taking things apart to see how they work: understanding how adversaries had penetrated secure systems, and how to penetrate theirs. That instinct for puzzles still anchors his research.

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; he previously advised Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3).

As a Visiting Professor at Surrey, Alan teaches and mentors students, favouring practical labs and workshops, 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 UK organisations on how the profession should train and certify the expertise the field needs.

Alan 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 technologies in plain terms, he is a frequent first port of call for journalists covering major 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. His practical work has been recognised with Chartered Engineer, Chartered Physicist, Chartered IT Practitioner and European Engineer (EUR ING) status.