CyberCorps Scholarship for Service: Excellence, Ethics, and Strategic Thinking

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The project establishes a new CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service (SFS) program at Robert Morris University (RMU) in western PA that will recruit and develop excellent cybersecurity talent with strong ethics and strategic thinking skills to defend America’s cyberspace. The general goal of the project is to recruit highly qualified and diverse cyber talent and develop them into cybersecurity professionals to meet the growing needs of the federal, state, local and tribal government workforce. The project will utilize an existing cybersecurity program to closely engage students in research and ethical training with faculty mentors and government professionals, providing the education and training needed for government service. It will implement and improve a unique and comprehensive mentoring model with new empirical data to benefit the broader national cybersecurity education effort. The project aims to extend the SFS scholarship to student populations that are historically underrepresented by recruiting from partner community colleges. RMU is a national Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education (CAE-CDE) designated by the National Security Agency/Department of Homeland Security (NSA/DHS) and a national CyberPatriot Center of Excellence (COE) designated by the US Airforce Association. The RMU SFS project will recruit and graduate selected students in both the Cybersecurity B.S. and the 4+1 integrated Cybersecurity M.S. programs. All SFS students are required to complete Cybersecurity Research, Cybersecurity Ethics, and a SFS Seminar every semester. As part of the Cybersecurity M.S., students will take three courses with a strong research emphasis. The unique mentoring model for the SFS project consists of academic mentoring, career guidance, extra-curricular mentoring, and ethical guidance. The RMU SFS project team will utilize working relationships with federal and local governments to provide student internship opportunities.This project is supported by the CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, which funds proposals establishing or continuing scholarship programs in cybersecurity and aligns with the U.S. National Cyber Strategy to develop a superior cybersecurity workforce. Following graduation, scholarship recipients are required to work in cybersecurity for a federal, state, local, or tribal Government organization for the same duration as their scholarship support.  This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.