Towards Models for Cybersecurity Summer Research Institutes for Undergraduate Engagement and Education

The U.S. faces ongoing and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public and private sectors and, ultimately, the Nation's privacy and security. To help address these challenges, the Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense (CBTS) Center of Excellence (COE) partnered with the Texas A\&M University System RELLIS Academic Alliance and Texas A&M University-Commerce to establish a "Summer Research Institute" in the discipline of cybersecurity. This paper describes and details the inaugural edition of this annual program that aims to help build a future homeland security science and engineering workforce by engaging undergraduate students on research projects encompassing prevention, detection, assessment, and remediation of cyber incidents. In its inaugural year, the CBTS Summer Research Institute supported faculty subject matter experts in cybersecurity and upper-class undergraduate student teams in hands-on 10-week summer research programs. The summer research program was designed to combine technical research and hands-on implementation with invited guest lectures and field trips with industry and DHS officials. This paper describes the opportunities and challenges and expands on lessons learned for improved program structures in future iterations of the institute.