SLIPPERY ROCK— Nitin Sukhija, a Slippery Rock University associate professor of computer science, is among selected national leaders and advocates of high-quality scientific software who was awarded a Better Scientific Software Fellowship, a program that funds activities that "improve developer productivity and software sustainability of scientific codes."

Sukhija is one of six members of the BSSw Fellowship Class of 2022, which includes leaders in scientific software development from universities, national laboratories and industry. The BSSw Fellowship is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation,. Fellows are selected based on an application process that includes the proposal of a funded activity that promotes better scientific software. Fellows receive up to $25,000 for activities that include organizing workshops, preparing tutorials or creating content to engage the scientific software community.

"This fellowship will not only allow me to advance my research in securing software and computing systems, but also it will aid multiple research communities to develop more trustworthy and secure scientific software," Sukhija said.

Sukhija, who is director of SRU's Center for Cybersecurity and Advanced Computing, will work to help practitioners mitigate the risk of software vulnerabilities with best practices and tools for secure scientific software development. He will create a one-day workshop on securing scientific software development. The workshop will be conducted both virtually and in-person, and will provide attendees guidance for evaluating design practices for creating secure software, software processes for managing secure software, threat modeling, and quality assurance testing using both static and dynamic analysis tools.