Sagar Samtani
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Sagar Samtani, assistant professor of operations and decision technologies at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, is the school’s first recipient of a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is one of the National Science Foundation‘s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty members who have “the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to its criteria.
Samtani, a Weimer Faculty Fellow at Kelley, is an expert on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, dark web analytics, cyber threats, deep learning, and mental health related to technology. He directs the school’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, or DSAIL, a multi-disciplinary research group that develops practical data and AI-enabled techniques for societally relevant applications.
Ash Soni
“In his relatively short career, Professor Samtani has proven to be a leading researcher of some of the most revolutionary advancements in technology,” said Ash Soni, dean of the Kelley School and The Sungkyunkwan Professor. “He has a sixth sense for zeroing in on potential threats in the cyber world and how they might affect different aspects of business and society. More importantly, he has a passion for sharing information and leading discussions – among students, colleagues, and industry leaders – to find practical solutions. He’s highly deserving of this award.”
The NSF CAREER Award will support a new research project at DSAIL, “An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Analytics Perspective for Developing Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence,” with funding totaling $604,594. Samtani said the project, for which he is principal investigator, will help develop integrated AI-enabled analytics research and education around important topics in cyber threat intelligence, including modeling adversarial behaviors, vulnerability management and open-source software security.
Rebecca Slotegraaf
“Professor Samtani is zealous in not only building on emerging trends in AI but also creating new avenues to understand how AI is shifting vulnerabilities to society, organizations, and government,” said Rebecca Slotegraaf, associate dean for research and the Neal Gilliatt Chair and Professor of Marketing. “Receiving the NSF CAREER Award is a strong testament to his commitment to transforming knowledge, practice, and education.”
“I am humbled by this recognition, which reflects the tremendous support I have received since coming to the Kelley School and from my colleagues across Indiana University,” Samtani said. “The NSF CAREER Award is an extraordinarily special grant for a professor in any discipline. I am thrilled that it also reflects the opportunities available to those who are at the Kelley School.”
Samtani joined the Kelley School in 2020 and quickly established himself as a prolific and pioneering researcher on high-relevance topics and a top-tier teacher. He developed one of the nation’s first courses related to AI for cybersecurity. He has also co-founded several workshops on the topic at prevailing conferences in information systems and artificial intelligence.
He is also deeply engaged with industry, most notably through his consulting engagements and roles on the Executive Advisory Council for the CompTIA Information Sharing and Analysis Organization and the Board of Directors at the DEFCON AI Village.
Samtani has been a principal investigator or a co-PI for more than a dozen sponsored research awards totaling more than $5 million since earning his doctorate. His portfolio includes NSF support for a project that seeks to protect open-source software institutions worldwide use to collaborate and share research findings. He also is an investigator on an NSF grant being used to train the next generation of the nation’s crucial cybersecurity workforce. IU is a participating institution in NSF CyberCorps Scholarship for Service, which trains information technology professionals and security managers to meet the rapidly growing cybersecurity needs of federal, state, local, and tribal governments.
Last year, Samtani received IU’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, which is the most prestigious campus-wide award for pre-tenured faculty and recognizes the university’s most promising young faculty. He also won the INFORMS ISS Gordon B. Davis Young Scholar Award and the IEEE Big Data Security Junior Research Award in 2023.
In December 2022, he received the Association for Information Systems’ AIS Early Career Award, which also recognizes individuals in the early stages of their careers who have already made outstanding research, teaching, or service contributions to information systems. He was the first Kelley faculty member to receive the award from AIS, which also has recognized him as a Distinguished Member.
Poets and Quants included him on their list of Top 50 Best Undergraduate Professors in 2022. He is the only member from academia in the prestigious CyberCorps Scholarship-for-Service Hall of Fame, which the National Science Foundation and Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency sponsor.
Samtani received a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2018 with a minor in cognitive science. He began his career at the University of South Florida.