Northrop Grumman donates $2.76M to ACES honors program

Prince Frederick Hall houses the ACES honors program, which will receive a $2.76 million donation from Northrop Grumman.

This university announced today a $2.76 million donation from Northrop Grumman Foundation to further expand the Honors College’s Advanced Cybersecurity Experiences for Students program, an official said.

Northrop Grumman Corp., a global security and technology company specializing in deflecting cyber-based threats, pledged these funds to help the program sustain an unanticipated increase in students, ACES Director Michel Cukier said. This donation will provide additional faculty, classroom and lab space for students, Cukier said.

As the first cybersecurity honors program in the country, its inaugural semester in fall 2013 had a class of 45 students, he said. This fall, 104 students enrolled in ACES, he said.

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Growing from a two-year living-learning experience into a four-year program featuring a 16-credit minor, ACES’s success has attracted students from several disciplines, including mathematics, engineering, computer science, business, music, criminology and psychology, Cukier said.

“The goal is to have the best students at cybersecurity in the region,” he said. “We not only want to bring students into the field, but also bring diversity into STEM and keep [students] in the region.”

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Cukier said he seeks to not only include students from a diverse range of majors, but also to attract women and underrepresented minority students to the program. As of today, women make up 24 percent of ACES’s student body, and women and minority students together comprise 30 percent of the program, he said.

The program’s hands-on experiences, coupled with the instruction offered by prominent cybersecurity experts and the emphasis on leadership training, provides an advantage for students as they enter the job market, he said.

“It makes them extremely interesting for companies,” Cukier said. “As an Honors program, it shows they’re the top 25 percent at Maryland … learn[ing] most of the techniques experts need in the field.”

Jake Richard, a freshman computer science major in the ACES program, said the networking and resume-building opportunities available to him through the program impressed him.

“I’ve been really satisfied with all the companies that have been coming in,” Richard said. “I’ve been able to get my resume out there already, which I’d say is a really good advantage.” 

He said the seminars available to him and his peers offer several different perspectives to the field of cybersecurity, including problem solving, data analysis and policy. He also said this breadth of instruction has served to shape ACES students into competitive job applicants.   

The success of the ACES program and Northrop Grumman’s commitment to its growth helped the university win the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities 2015 Connections Award, the organization’s top honor. This award distinguishes institutions that foster talent within a specific field and work toward community development, according to a news release.   

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“The support that the Northrop Grumman Foundation has committed in support of the ACES program shows how important this type of workforce is to the nation,” Mary Ann Rankin, this university’s senior vice president and provost, wrote in a news release. “This generous gift will allow us to continue to educate and train our students to be future cybersecurity leaders and meet the growing needs in the nation and state.”