About the Project
The BU Cyber Competence Centre at Bournemouth University invites applications from prospective postgraduate researchers who wish to commence study for a PhD in the academic year 2027/28 (start January 2027). This fully funded PhD place provides an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in a range of fields relating to cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and human cognition.
Bournemouth University has been awarded two HORIZON-CL3-2025-02-CS-ECCC-02 projects, namely SCIFER and MosAIcSOC. These conduct research in tools for contemporary Security Operations Centres, where both computing systems and people face challenges and pressures due to AI-enabled attacks.
Security analysts increasingly use AI to interpret complex information, investigate incidents, prioritise threats and support decisions. This creates new opportunities for faster and more effective cyber defence, but it also introduces a new and comparatively unexplored source of security risk: the relationship between the human decision-maker and the AI system.
This PhD will investigate this emerging human-AI decision boundary in cybersecurity. The project will examine how cybersecurity professionals process and respond to AI-generated information, including how attention, interpretation of evidence, uncertainty, trust, dependence on AI and risk judgement shape subsequent security decisions. Particular attention will be given to how these processes develop as interaction with Generative AI becomes a routine part of cybersecurity work. A central element of the project will be the development of a Cognitive Security Twin: a dynamic computational representation of security-relevant aspects of an individual's interaction with AI.
The successful candidate will join Bournemouth University's growing interdisciplinary cybersecurity and AI research environment and will benefit from the University's new Cyber Competence Centre. The Centre provides an immersive environment for simulating realistic cyber incidents and exploring AI-supported threat detection, incident response and human decision-making. Its distinctive emphasis on both technological and human aspects of cyber resilience provides a particularly strong setting for this project, which sits at the intersection of cybersecurity, Generative AI and human cognition.
