CyAN’s mentorship programme, launched in April 2023, has just completed.
As part of CyAN’s mission to support maturity and trust in the global cybersecurity ecosystem, the board of directors decided in spring 2023 to leverage our members’ experience, knowledge, and networks to help promising academics improve their ties to the industry.
Our 6 initial candidates, supported by 5 member mentors, have national origins and academic backgrounds from around the world, focusing on a wide variety of topics. All participants were asked to provide a final contribution as part of the programme, such as a podcast/video interview, blog post, article, or other work relevant to their research and information security-related interests:
| Candidate | Affiliation | Role | Final Output | Mentor |
| Nils Eiling | FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (DE) | MSc Candidate / Graduate | CyAN Mentorship Programme Report | Boris Taratine |
| Florian Hantke | CISPA Helmholtz (DE) | PhD Candidate / Graduate | Florian Hantke – pen tester, vulnerability researcher, cybersecurity doctoral candidate | John Salomon |
| Étienne Bryan Botog | École High-Tech (MA) | Master’s Candidate / Graduate | Explorons les Tendances Actuelles des Menaces Cybernétiques et Comment s’en Protéger | Pierre Noel |
| Jillian Kwong | Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS) (US) | Research Scientist | Jillian Kwong – Cybersecurity Challenges in Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) | John Salomon |
| Aliasgar Erinpurwala | EM Lyon Business School (FR) | MSc Candidate / Graduate | The Growing Threat of Quantum Supremacy in The Era Of Digital Civilization | Matthieu Camus |
| Hugo Tarrida | King’s College London (UK) | MA Candidate / Graduate | Hugo Tarrida on Cyberdefence and Information Warfare | Ricardo Gonçalves |
All participants will be automatically inducted into the CyAN community, with membership fees waived for the coming year.
While logistically challenging, the mentorship pilot was a strong and rewarding success for all participants, paving the way for the deployment of a standing programme with the help of CyAN members and our friends throughout the industry. All mentors were highly impressed by the calibre and enthusiasm of the scholars they worked with.
We sincerely hope that we can inspire other organisations – whether commercial firms, NGOs, or public-private partnerships, to look into starting talent development programmes of their own, and to support existing initiatives. Cybersecurity is a tough field to enter, despite frequent reports of a supposed vast number of unfilled vacancies. Society and industry can only flourish with a steady pipeline of talented, motivated, and smart new experts; these do not come from nowhere. Please consider mentoring career aspirants, thus helping us assure that there will always be both professional opportunities, and good people to fill them.