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Tennessee Tech has a received a $3,000,000 grant to research the overlap of energy, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence.
Electrical and Computer Engineering Interim Chair Indranil Bhattacharya said they will be paying twenty-four graduate students to research how energy systems work and how best to defend them from cyberattacks. Bhattacharya said these systems are often left vulnerable because there is not enough cooperation between the three fields they will be researching.
“Now they are also not only just doing their master’s thesis or PhD dissertation, they will get a stipend of $34,000 per year,” Bhattacharya said. “Which is actually a good salary increase in terms of what we currently pay here at Tennessee Tech.”
Bhattacharya said these students will be able to go on to become research scientists for organizations such as the TVA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Bhattacharya said this National Science Foundation grant is highly competitive with only sixteen spaces available and many top institutions fighting to get it.
“Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, they all are competing,” he said. “And I’m extremely proud of the team.”
Bhattacharya said the electrical and computer engineering department will lead the project with assistance from the computer science and mechanical engineering branches of the university.
“We will train students here, but we will behave like a role model for a lot of these kinds of projects that in the future when future technologies require much more complexity,” Bhattacharya said. “But bringing professors and students together from different departments, interdisciplinary research in these areas will be tremendous.”
Bhattacharya said part of the reason they got the grant is because this is the first time the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship Program is being used for this combination of technologies.
“Even the NSF Program Officer told us that this is one of the most competitive grants in the entire National Science Foundation,” Bhattacharya said.
Bhattacharya said the grant will also cover the students’ tuition and fees as it is specifically designed to support graduate students in their research efforts.
