Cybersecurity research and education is an area of national importance and CCNY strength.
Five faculty members of The City College of New York are among the 12 faculty members from six CUNY campuses who have received funding from Google as part of a three-year, $3 million grant from the company.
The grants come from the Google Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program, a multi-year initiative designed to advance cybersecurity research and education in New York City.
Now in its third year, the program supports pathbreaking work that addresses emerging challenges and opportunities in the cybersecurity field. Each of the lead principal investigators will receive $80,000 in direct funding for their teams, along with access to a shared pool of $140,000 in Google Cloud Platform credits.
The CCNY faculty members and their winning projects are:
- CUNY Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering Yingli Tian (principal investigator, or PI) for “Towards Safer Privacy: Leveraging Synthetic Face Generation for Facial Data Protection;”
- Associate Professor of Computer Science Nelly Fazio (PI) and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Tushar Jois (co-PI) for “Cryptographically Secure Mesh Messaging for Large-Scale Protests;”
- Herbert G. Kayser Professor of Computer Science Zhigang Zhu (co-PI) for “On-the-Go Privacy: Real-Time and Predictive Visual Privacy Alerts for Smartphone or Wearable Systems;” and
- Assistant Professor of Computer Science Tushar Jois (PI) and Professor of Computer Science Rosario Gennaro (co-PI) for “Cryptographic Computation over Spot VMs.”
“The Google Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program is an important recognition of the cutting-edge and critical research being conducted at City College and across the University,” said Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Tony M. Liss. “This is an area of national importance and City College strength, and I am proud that five of our faculty have been recognized by Google for their expertise in cybersecurity.”
More about the winners from across CUNY is available at https://www.gc.cuny.edu/news/announcing-cuny-winners-2025-google-cybersecurity-grants.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Lightcast puts at $3.2 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. In 2023, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign, ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Syd Steinhardt
212-650-7875
ssteinhardt@ccny.cuny.edu