Redmiles, Graduate Student Advised by Mazurek, Receives Facebook Fellowship

Elissa Redmiles (pictured in photo), a second-year doctoral student in computer science advised by UMIACS’ Michelle Mazurek, is the recipient of a Facebook Fellowship for her work helping users make security-related decisions online.

The two-year Facebook Fellowship Program, started in 2010, is designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students who are engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering.

Recipients of the fellowship receive two years of tuition and fees paid, a stipend of $37,000 each year, and up to $5,000 in conference travel support.

Redmiles, who is amongst 13 doctoral students chosen for the 2017 fellowship, was selected from more than 800 students from universities around the world.

Her research focuses on understanding how users make security decisions and developing security education interventions for at-risk users.

Redmiles says she is excited that she was selected for the fellowship.

“The Facebook Fellowship will help me to expand the scope of my work helping users, especially those who are new to the internet, stay safe online,” she says. “I'm really thrilled that Facebook has taken an interest in and supported my work on these issues.”

Mazurek, an assistant professor of computer science with joint appointments in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, says Redmiles’ research is important and that she is extremely deserving of the fellowship.

“Elissa is doing wonderful work understanding how computer security advice reaches people from a variety of technical and educational backgrounds, and how we can best shape that advice to be more effective,” she says. “Given the plethora of bad security advice out there—wrong, difficult to understand, insufficiently credible—understanding how to make good advice ‘sticky’ is critical to improving security knowledge amongst non-expert end users.”

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