Soon after starting a master’s program in operations research at Georgia Tech, Dan Li remained restless. She wanted more—more challenging courses, more avenues to make a wider-reaching impact. And so she swapped the master’s for the long haul of pursuing a PhD.
Clearly, Li gravitates toward demanding work.
Li, who is joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering in fall 2024, develops algorithms to prevent and detect cyberattacks in industrial and control systems, specifically those used in manufacturing plants.
According to the IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2023, manufacturing was the most attacked operational-technology-related industry in 2022.
“Those are not initiated by an amateur hacker sitting in front of the computer at their home, but actually a group of experts of engineering and computer science and networks, all together to design a very sophisticated attack to target some critical infrastructure,” says Li. “But there are a lot of things we can do.”
By leveraging data from the array of sensors and control systems employed in so-called “cyber-physical” manufacturing systems, Li develops more accurate and time-sensitive attack detection algorithms.
“That’s a huge difference from the traditional IT cyberattack detection algorithms, because they mostly work on the network traffic data” says Li, whose research group also conducts risk assessment to identify weak points across cyber networks and the physical processes they control. “This is a very nice extra layer of protection. It’s not a substitute for those types of technologies, but really another layer by taking how the system works physically into consideration.”
Prior to arriving in Madison, Li spent three years on the faculty of Clemson University, where she earned a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support her work safeguarding critical manufacturing systems.
While at Clemson, Li also collaborated with colleagues specializing in human factors engineering, incorporating the perspectives and considerations of the workers who interact with complex cyber-physical systems. She’s teaming with former Clemson colleague Jackie Cha, a human factors and ergonomics researcher, on another NSF-funded project to thwart attacks to the cyberinfrastructure supporting robot-assisted surgeries.
Li sees potential for similar collaborations across the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and beyond.
“I was really fascinated, first of all, by the diverse research areas that ISyE faculty work on,” says Li, who studied automotive engineering as an undergraduate at Tsinghua University, where she discovered her knack for data science. “As I said when I was interviewing, I feel like everyone is a rock star in their field. It’s a very strong program. And also there are other strong engineering and science programs at UW-Madison, and I can see future collaboration opportunities with those faculty as well. It’s an amazing place.”