Paschal Amusuo (3rd from left) and James Davis (2nd from left) pose with other faculty and CERIAS members after the presentaton of the Diamond Awards at the 27th Annual Information Security Symposium. (Purdue University photo)

Paschal Amusuo, a PhD student in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the CERIAS Diamond Award, an honor that recognizes outstanding student achievement in cybersecurity research.

Amusuo was nominated by his advisor, Purdue ECE professor James Davis, who highlighted both the strength of Amusuo’s research and the determination behind it. Amusuo has published nine papers during his PhD, including three first-author papers at top software engineering conferences. He also has additional papers under review and is on track to finish his doctoral studies with an unusually strong publication record.

Amusuo’s work has had impact beyond academia. Davis noted that Amusuo’s research has helped identify 29 distinct cybersecurity vulnerabilities in software projects maintained by major organizations including AWS, Google and Qualcomm. His work spans areas such as software security, formal verification and software supply chain security.

Amusuo’s accomplishments are especially notable because he entered Purdue without the background many students bring to advanced cybersecurity research. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from a state university in Nigeria, where he had limited access to undergraduate research opportunities and no formal training in software engineering or cybersecurity. Still, Davis said Amusuo quickly closed those gaps, excelling in coursework across ECE, computer science, mathematics and statistics while also seeking out hands-on cybersecurity experiences.

Amusuo’s joined Davis’ lab in 2021, when the it was still new and lacked the larger mentoring structure of more established groups. To build expertise, Amusuo pursued collaborations across Purdue and beyond while becoming an active participant in the CERIAS community through research projects, poster presentations and cybersecurity events.

His work has also earned other major recognitions, including a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship and a Purdue College of Engineering Magoon Research Excellence Award. After graduation, Amusuo will join Google full time.

The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) is one of the world’s leading centers for research and education in areas of information security that are crucial to the protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure. CERIAS is unique among such national centers in its multidisciplinary approach to the problems, ranging from purely technical issues to ethical, legal, educational, communicational, linguistic, and economic issues, and the subtle interactions and dependencies among them.

The research conducted through CERIAS includes faculty from seven different colleges and 20+ departments across campus.