Masooda Bashir has been promoted to the position of associate professor at the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2019.
Bashir joined the iSchool faculty in 2013. She previously served as assistant director for social trust initiatives in the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at Illinois, where she led multiple ITI educational initiatives, including the Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program and the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP).
At the iSchool, Bashir teaches courses in privacy in the internet age, information assurance, ethics of cybersecurity, and digital forensics. The School named her the 2018-2019 Centennial Scholar for "outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in the field of library and information science."
"Masooda's integration of pioneering interdisciplinary research themes with novel educational endeavors will help ensure the effective training of tomorrow's workforce and future leaders who can address the challenges that will face us in the decades to come," said Dean Allen Renear.
Bashir serves as the director of Social Sciences in Engineering Research in the College of Engineering and holds appointments in the Information Trust Institute, Coordinated Science Laboratory, Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, and Beckman Institute. She has led and served as co-principal investigator on several multidisciplinary projects, such as the ICSSP; Program in Digital Forensics curriculum development; and most recently, Ethical Thinking in Cyber Space (EthiCS), an interdisciplinary initiative funded by the National Security Agency.
Before coming to Illinois, she worked for several years as a systems analyst, technical trainer, manager, and global manager for a number of corporations in Silicon Valley, including Lotus and IBM. She holds degrees in mathematics, computer science, and psychology and earned her PhD in psychology from Purdue University.