Chitra Balakrishna, Ph.D. MBCS, SFHEA , CEH is an academic, author, keynote speaker, futuristic technology and open source enthusiast with over 24 years of experience spanning across academia and industry in the areas of Cyber Security, Data Networking, Mobile Communications, Technologies and Applications. Chitra is currently a professor of cyber security and the Deputy Head of school of Computing and Communications at the Open University . She was academic group lead for Cyber Security at OU and has led the cyber security strand within the government funded Institute of Coding (IoC) project aimed to enhance UK’s digital skills and address the skills gap. Chitra has been appointed as the member of board of trustees at the UK cyber security council for her contributions to cyber security education, training and its professionalisation. She has been instrumental in acquiring research income of over £2 million as a co-investigator and principal investigator from funding sources such as ERDF, Innovate UK, HEA, EPSRC and British Council. She has over 40 academic publications to her credit in international journals, peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed conference proceedings. In addition, she has authored a highly cited book on 'IP Multimedia Subsystem ' by John Wiley publications.https://www.open.ac.uk/people/cb32322