Student profiles

Harinda Fernando
Doctor of Philosophy, 2012
School of Information Technology
Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus
Employed: Sessional tutor, School of Information Technology

Although Harinda Fernando completed his undergraduate studies at Deakin, familiarity with the University wasn’t the main reason he chose it for his PhD studies. Rather, he says, it was Deakin’s expertise in his chosen field of Information Technology (IT) security.

‘When I was looking to start my PhD I already knew the specific area I wanted to do my research in. I talked to a number of academics in the field, including those from other universities, and they all recommended Deakin (and notably, my current supervisor) as the best option for my chosen research area.’

Harinda’s research area is in the mix of networking, security and pervasive computing. It is focused on improving the performance and security of networked systems.

‘The actual research involves analysing the security weaknesses of existing systems, developing better security solutions that are not too computationally demanding and then testing those proposals for security and performance to ensure they meet the requirements,’ he explains.

Enjoying a number of opportunities to travel overseas to present at conferences, Harinda recently travelled to China to present at Trustcom 2011, a well-known conference in the area of IT security and privacy.

Currently enjoying tutoring work with Deakin undergraduate students - and with his PhD almost complete - Harinda would like pursue further academic work while also conducting more research in the field of IT security.