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Dr Chris Hewes-Lewington

Head of Technology and Engineering

Email
c.hewes-lewington@uos.ac.uk
School/Directorate
School of Business, Arts, Social Sciences and Technology
Chris Hewes-Lewington ORCID
View Orchid Profile

Dr Chris Hewes-Lewington is Head of Technology and Engineering in the School of BASST and joined the University in June 2019 after a long and successful industrial career spanning the finance, telecommunications, defence and biotechnology sectors. Chris has held a variety of leadership, senior management, and development roles from programmer through to IT director and has many years of practical software engineering experience. Chris’s main area of academic expertise is cyber security, specialising in social engineering, governance, cryptography and threat modelling. He has appeared several times on BBC and ITV news, radio and the local press, discussing major security incidents and giving advice on personal security.

Chris's early academic research focused on Formal Methods, followed by a broad range of industrial research projects including Intelligent Collaborative Agents, Network Computing and distributed technologies based on the CORBA standard. His current academic interests focus on post-quantum cryptography, ransomware, zero-trust architectures, internet regulation, questions of ethics, bias and the law in computer science (particularly in relation to data privacy), security applications of artificial intelligence, social engineering and open source intelligence (OSINT).

Chris holds PhD and MSc (with distinction) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Essex, a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Hertfordshire, an LLB Law degree from the University of London, and a Masters degree (with distinction) in Advanced Security and Digital Forensics, which is accredited by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), from Edinburgh Napier University. He is also a Certified Java Professional at Programmer, Developer and Part 1 Architect levels.

  • Course Leader, MSc Applied Cyber Security
     
  • Taught and developed modules in Fundamentals of Cyber Security, Human and System Cyber Security, Strategic Cyber Security, Data Structures, Algorithms and Advanced Programming, Computing Research Skills
     
  • Supervised over 25 undergraduate, postgraduate and synoptic projects
     
  • Experienced PhD co-supervisor and Progress Panel Assessor
     
  • Associate Lecturer, Open University (2019) – Algorithms, Data Structures and Computability
     
  • External Examiner, University of East London in Computer Science (2017 – 2021), with responsibility for several modules including Advanced Programming, Artificial Intelligence, Operating Systems and undergraduate projects

‘Cost-effective Cyber Security for Small Businesses’ – CyberASAP/InnovateUK funded project, April 2022

Expert Panel for British Science Week 2022, for a Q and A session with the public on Digital Forensics and Ransomware 

E-learning Platform for Suffolk MIND – June to December 2019, EIRA funded collaborative project with University of Essex (co-investigators: Professor Nicholas Caldwell, Sean Preston)

Publications

Lewington, C. P. (2023) ‘Programming Privacy: An Evaluation of Homomorphic Encryption Compilers’. Submitted to ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

Hermjakob, Henning & Montecchi-Palazzi, Luisa & Lewington, Chris & Mudali, Sugath & Kerrien, Samuel & Orchard, Sandra & Vingron, Martin & Roechert, Bernd & Roepstorff, Peter & Valencia, Alfonso & Margalit, Hanah & Armstrong, John & Bairoch, Amos & Cesareni, Gianni & Sherman, David & Apweiler, Rolf. (2004). ‘IntAct: An open source molecular interaction database’. Nucleic acids research. 32. D452-5. 10.1093/nar/gkh052.

Lewington, C. P. (1994) Deriving Denotational Semantics from Axiomatic Semantics within Constructive Set Theory. University of Essex Report, Department of Computer Science. 

Lewington C.P. (1990) ‘Towards constructive program derivation in VDM’. In: Nori K.V., Veni Madhavan C.E. (eds) Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science. FSTTCS 1990. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 472. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

 

Lewington, C. P. (2023) ‘Cyber Security is all about Technology – or is it?’ Invited talk, CyberEAST open business event on skills for cyber security, March 2023

  • Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (FIMA)
     
  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA)
     
  • Fellow of Advance HE (FHEA)