ACADEMIA

NCSA will play a key role in a new national center addressing the challenge of protecting the nation's power grid. The center, Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP), has been established at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by a $7.5 million, five-year Cyber Trust grant from the National Science Foundation. "Our nation is dependent on a reliable, robust electrical power grid. The new center will bring recent advances in computing technology to bear on this critical national problem, and NCSA is pleased to be a part of this effort," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. TCIP will be led by Bill Sanders, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Nineteen University faculty members and senior researchers will be involved with work at the TCIP center, which will be part of the university's Information Trust Institute. The institute includes researchers from aerospace engineering, computer science, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, electrical and computer engineering, general engineering, NCSA, and the College of Law. The institute provides national leadership in conducting research to create trustworthy and secure information systems. Researchers from Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and Washington State University also will participate in the TCIP center. For more information on the TCIP center, go to >a href="http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/05/0815researchcenter.html"> its Web site.