Willy Susilo

Willy Susilo is a Distinguished Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow at the School of Computing and Information Technology, UOW. He is a Fellow of several academies: IEEE, IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) Fellow, ACS (Australian Computer Society), AAIA and AIIA.

In 2024, he was awarded the 2024 Premier's Prizes in Engineering and Communications Technology.

He was awarded a prestigious ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2023. He is the director of Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology (iC2), School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong. Willy is an innovative educator and researcher. He has served as the Head of School of Computing and Information Technology at UOW (2015 - 2025). Throughout this tenure as Head of School, his major achievement was elevating the School’s research culture and performance. Through strategic leadership, mentoring, and targeted support for research development, the School achieved outstanding success in national research recognition, producing prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellows. This is an exceptional outcome for a School of this size and reflects his strong commitment to research excellence and innovation and mentoring.

Prior to the role of Head of School of Computing and Information Technology, he was awarded the prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2009. He was the former Head of School of Computer Science and Software Engineering (2009 - 2010) and the Deputy Director of ICT Research Institute at UOW (2006 - 2008). He is the Editor in Chief of the Computers Standards and Interface (Elsevier) and Information (MDPI) journal. He has served as an Associate Editor in IEEE Transactions in Information Forensics and Computing and he is currently serving as an Associate Editor in IEEE Transactions in Dependable and Secure Computing.

Willy obtained his PhD from the University of Wollongong in 2001. He has published more than 500 research papers in journals and conference proceedings in cryptography and network security. He has served as the program committee member in dozens of international conferences. In 2016, he was awarded the Researcher of the Year award at UOW, due to his research excellence and contributions. His work on the creation of short signature schemes has been well cited and it is part of the IETF draft.
In 2019, he was awarded the "Supervisor of the Year" award at UOW, due to his excellent supervision and mentoring experience.
In 2020, he was awarded the "Vice Chancellors Award for Global Strategy" for his contribution to the University's internationalisation and global strategy.