About
Phil Legg is a Professor of Cyber Security at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol), UK, in recognition of "Advancing Teaching and Learning" (Primary domain) and for "Research with Impact" (Secondary domain). He is Co-Director of the UWEcyber Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE), as recognised by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). He was Programme Leader for the NCSC-certified MSc Cyber Security at UWE since it launched in 2018, handing this role over in September 2024. As of 2024, he became part of the Programme Leadership team for the BSc Cyber Security and Digital Forensics programme. He also serves as the Cyber Security research theme leader for the Computer Science Research Centre (CSRC).
His research intersects across Cyber Security, looking at how machine learning, visual analytics, and human-computer interaction are adopted within cyber security, to improve interpretability and understanding of risk, and to improve robustness and trust of modern security technologies. His early research addresses the robustness of machine learning and computer vision systems, as well as how such models can be utilised for insider threat detection and cyber situational awareness. He has also worked on developing mitigations against adversarial machine learning techniques, as well as investigation container-based security vulnerabilities. More recently, he is interested in how human-machine teaming can help to establish confidence and trust in human-machine agents, and how active learning techniques can be used to interrogate model robustness and identify security vulnerabilities such as adversarial learning cases. Further details on the Cyber Security research theme available here.
He holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning for Higher Education (Distinction), and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). He is a professional member of the IEEE and the BCS. He holds CompTIA certifications SecurityX (formerly CASP+), PenTest+, and Security+, as well as Microsoft Azure, Security, Data, and AI certifications (AZ-900, SC-900, DP-900, AI-900), and is a certified instructor for Palo Alto Networks. He is recognised as a Full Member of the Chartered Institute of Information Security (MCIIS), as well as a member of the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC).
He began his academic career at Cardiff University, where he completed his BSc Computer Science (2006), and went on to study for a PhD in Computer Science (2010), whilst also working as an academic support tutor (2006-2010) and as a post-doctoral researcher (2010). He has also held post-doctoral research and teaching roles at Swansea University (2010-2013) and the University of Oxford (2013-2015), working with a variety of stakeholders across both industry and government. He joined UWE Bristol in 2015 as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, and was appointed as Associate Professor of Cyber Security in October 2018, and most recently, Professor of Cyber Security in January 2022.