Errin Fulp, PhD

About Errin Fulp

Errin Fulp, PhD, received his doctorate in computer science from North Carolina State University in 1998. In 2000, he became an assistant professor in the department of computer science at Wake Forest University. He was named an associate professor with tenure in 2006 and full professor in 2012. He also has considerable experience working with national laboratories and with leading companies in the computer industry.

Fulp believes network-oriented security touches every aspect of our computing lives, from mobile devices to the computers we use at work and at home. With the introduction of even more smart devices connected to the internet, opportunities for mischief are multiplied. Fulp works to see how nature handles diverse threats at an enormous scale and how those solutions inform network security strategies. Among the nature-inspired ideas he is developing is the use of evolutionary principles to automate the process of determining configuration settings.

N-resilience, a solution developed by Fulp and his team, establishes a diverse ecosystem of layered hardware to enhance protection against external attacks. Digital ants is another bioinspired cyber defense approach that Fulp and his colleagues designed to provide highly efficient swarming defense for distributed computing system such as the power grid and the internet of things.

Fulp’s research is highly relevant to ongoing efforts to protect systems through high-level software management. He has considerable experience collaborating with industry partners, becoming their research arm to pioneer new methods and approaches. As companies, large and small, are looking at new ways to ensure network security, Fulp and his students want to work with them to find solutions to emerging problems and challenges. He seeks long-term relationships with industry partners to encourage productive cross-fertilization of ideas, where students and engineers work together closely on the cutting edge of discovery.