Cloud Technology Endowed Fellowship
Unfilled chairs and professorships are used to support recently tenured faculty and help accelerate the success of their research through fellowships. The fellowships are one-year, nonrecurring honorific appointments. Fellows are nominated by academic leadership and selected by the provost through a competitive process.
Guenevere (Qian) Chen, Ph.D.
Cloud Technology Endowed Fellowship
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Guenevere Chen joined UTSA faculty in 2017 and has since focused her research efforts primarily on the field of cybersecurity. Her current cybersecurity research encompasses a wide range of areas, including SCADA systems, Internet of Things (IoT) and IoT-enabled systems, digital health and medical devices, AI-driven intrusion detection systems, software vulnerability detection, and the creation of secure federated-learning AI models. Additionally, she is strongly committed to advancing cybersecurity education and workforce development, with a special focus on empowering underrepresented minorities.
She is principal investigator of the Internet of Things (IoT) Security Lab at UTSA, which is dedicated to the research and development of IoT technologies and its security.
Chen’s research has been supported with more than $5.6 million dollars in funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA), and the San Antonio Life Sciences Institute (SALSI).
Notably, her CONCISE (Consortium on National Critical Infrastructure Security) project—funded by the DOE/NNSA Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (MSIPP)—has played a pivotal role in supporting over 100 undergraduate and graduate students from four MSIs through research experience, assistantships, and conferences like the annual DEF CON hacker convention and the DOE Cybersecurity and Innovation Technology Conference. Furthermore, the CONCISE Consortium has facilitated summer internships for more than 30 students at DOE national laboratories, with an impressive five of them subsequently joining the DOE/NNSA cybersecurity workforce upon graduation. Chen's commitment to fostering talent and expertise in the cybersecurity field is evident through these impactful initiatives.
Chen has contributed to her field by publishing research in top-tier peer-reviewed conferences and journals including USENIX Security, ACM Computing Surveys, the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and the IEEE Internet of Things Journal. Her SALSI-funded research paper, “State of Science in Alarm System Safety: Implications for Researchers, Vendors, and Clinical Leaders,” won The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) 2023 Publication Award. Her research paper, “Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan (Nuit): Exploiting Your Speaker to Attack Your Microphone,” was published by USENIX in 2023 and received global coverage in nine different languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, and others.
Chen earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University. Before joining UTSA, Chen was an assistant professor and coordinator of the computer science technology program at Savannah State University.
