Professor Chris Hankin receives the Distinguished Academic STEM Alumni Award 2024

On 17 September 2024, City’s School of Science & Technology will honour three of its most outstanding alumni at its third, annual STEM Alumni Awards ceremony.

This year, Professor Chris Hankin (BSc in Computer Science, First Class Honours, 1976) will receive The Distinguished Academic STEM Alumni Award. In a wide-ranging interview with City News, Professor Hankin shares his insights into how the field of computer science has matured over the years and the importance of quality STEM teaching.

Professor Hankin’s research is in cyber security, data analytics and semantics-based program analysis.

He is a Fellow of the Institute for Security Science and Technology (ISST) and a Professor of Computing Science at Imperial College London, and he directs the NCSC/EPSRC Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-Physical Systems (RITICS - ritics.org). He was chair of the Lead Expert Group for the Government Office of Science’s Policy Futures Foresight report on Future Identities.

Professor Hankin is chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Europe Technology Policy Committee and past chair of the ACM Europe Council.

I worked for a software house during my gap year and they offered to sponsor me through my degree if I could find a sandwich course in computer science.  At that time, in 1972, only five universities offered degree courses in computer science and the City course looked the most interesting.

Computer science was not a mature discipline in 1972 and the course was a mix of computing, mathematics and statistics. Undergraduates also had to study a humanities or social science module each year.  I enjoyed the breadth of topics in the course.  Many of the topics, notably information theory and analog computing, no longer feature in modern computer science curricula.

My final year project, although industrially focused, whetted my appetite for research.  Unfortunately, there were no studentships available at City, so I moved to Westfield College (University of London) for my PhD studies.  I was awarded my first academic position at Westfield and moved to Imperial about 40 years ago.

I have had a diverse career at Imperial, mixing academic work with senior administrative roles.  My academic work eventually led me to work on the security of cyber-physical systems and my role as Director of RITICS.  My early exposure to topics such as information theory and analog computing helped prepare me for some of the challenges faced by control engineers; an essential component of the RITICS work.

The greatest highlight has been the many exceptional people that I have had the privilege to supervise for their PhD studies or as postdocs – many of them now have senior positions in industry and academia.  There have been three phases in my Computer Science work: first, I worked on static program analysis, led many projects and eventually wrote one of the standard textbooks on this topic; next I worked on language based security and then cyber security for IT systems; finally I have worked on the security of critical infrastructure systems.  I have directed the national research institute for security of critical infrastructure systems (ritics.org) for the last ten years.

As well as offering a strong academic grounding in the subject, City has excellent links with local employers in London, providing a good variety of employment prospects to new graduates.  I am also pleased to note that all degree offerings in Computer Science include the opportunity for industrial placements.  My experiences on my sandwich placements helped me enormously with my academic studies.

The UK continues to face a crisis in terms of the availability of good STEM teachers in schools; as the pace of digitalisation increases, partially fuelled by the advances in AI, industry can offer much more attractive careers to STEM graduates than the teaching profession.  I also fear that current visa regulations for students will severely impact on the diversity of talent in our universities.