Dr Ruba Abu-Salma

Ruba Abu-Salma is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computer Science at King’s College London. Ruba is affiliated with the Cybersecurity Group in the Department of Informatics. Her research is interdisciplinary. She works at the intersection of cybersecurity, privacy, human-computer interaction (HCI), and privacy law. She uses computational and social science methods to explore and develop more equitable and trustworthy tools that improve people’s security, privacy, and online safety decision-making processes. Her work has been published at top-tier venues and has been covered by the popular press (The New York Times, The Register, and CNET).

Before joining King's, Ruba was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley (2020-2021) and in the PRIVATICS Team at Inria Sophia Antipolis (2019-2020).

Ruba completed her PhD in Computer Science from University College London (UCL) in 2019. Her dissertation focused on designing user-centered privacy-enhancing technologies. As a postgraduate student, she was supported by Google, a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellowship, and a Supporting Usability and Design in Security (SUDS) Fellowship from the Open Technology Fund. She also performed research at the Cambridge Cybercrime Center, Brave, and Telefónica Research.

Research interests

• Cybersecurity
• Privacy-enhancing technologies
• Human-computer interaction (HCI)
• Usable security and privacy
• Privacy and human rights

PhD supervision

Ruba is always on the lookout for talented PhD students to work with her on topics sitting at the intersection of cybersecurity, privacy, HCI, and at-risk/marginalized populations. Interested candidates should email her with their CV, a short research proposal, and any previous publications.

Further information

• Personal website
• Google Scholar