Prof. Dr. Karim Haddad

Prof. Dr. Karim Haddad is the Founding Professor of Cyber Security Fundamentals at ICS AI University and a permanent member of the academic faculty of the School of Cyber Security, reporting to the Dean of the School. He holds canonical academic ownership of the University's foundational cyber security curriculum and is the named academic authority for every Level 3 Cyber Security programme delivered by the University.

Born in Beirut and educated in Lebanon, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, Prof. Haddad holds dual Lebanese and British nationality and teaches in English, Arabic and French. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer & Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut, a Master of Science in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Cyber Security from ETH Zürich, where his doctoral research examined human factors in security decision-making and the measurable effect of security awareness on organisational risk.

Prof. Haddad spent the first decade of his career in industry practice, serving as a security operations analyst, then lead incident responder, and finally as Head of Information Security for an international banking group, where he was accountable for enterprise risk management, security governance and the organisation-wide security awareness programme. That practitioner grounding shapes every lesson he teaches: he introduces no concept without the operational reality that gives it meaning.

He returned to academia as Senior Lecturer in Information Security, was promoted to Reader, and subsequently appointed Professor. Across nineteen years of university teaching he has taught foundational cyber security to more than twelve thousand learners, designed six accredited security curricula, and supervised fourteen doctoral candidates. He is widely recognised for making the first weeks of a cyber security education unusually clear, calm and confidence-building for newcomers.

His research programme addresses security awareness and behaviour change, foundational security pedagogy, risk-communication for non-specialists, and the measurement of cyber hygiene at population scale. He has authored eighty-two peer-reviewed publications, two widely adopted undergraduate textbooks on information security principles, and a long-running practitioner column on everyday cyber hygiene.

Prof. Haddad serves on international curriculum and accreditation panels for foundational cyber security education and advises national programmes on public cyber-awareness strategy. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of ACM, ISACA and (ISC)², and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.