Dr. George D. O' Mahony

Dr O’Mahony pursued his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University College Cork. His Ph.D. research focused on enhancing security on resource-constrained edge devices in communication networks, namely Wireless Sensor Network, IoT (Internet of Things) and GPS applications. To improve edge device security machine learning techniques were applied to develop low complexity interference diagnostic tools for wireless edge devices. His research applied support vector machines, k-NNs and decision tree-based (Random Forest, XGBoost, AdaBoost) machine learning approaches to achieve low-complexity solutions, while deep neural networks were also developed as the resource-intensive approach. His PhD was in collaboration with Raytheon Technologies Research Center Ireland and the Irish Research Council. Dr O’Mahony won the "Best Student Paper" at ISSC 2020, the "Best Paper" at WTS 2020 and received an "Outstanding Student Paper" award at the WF-IoT 2020, along with publishing seven first authored conference papers, one first author magazine article and two first author journal papers as part of his PhD research. 

Dr O’Mahony joined MTU (Munster Technological University) as a cybersecurity lecturer/researcher in April 2021, where his teaching activities focus on securing networks and systems, penetration testing, threat hunting and cyber defense evasion. Dr O’Mahony’s research focuses on cyber resilience/resilient networks, IT/OT/IoT security, cyber range security verification and applications of machine learning in cyber security, specifically novel techniques for anomaly/attack detection. Since joining MTU, Dr O’Mahony has become the WorldSkills Ireland Expert for Skill 54 Cybersecurity, an Associate Investigator in SFI CONNECT research centre contributing to the area of cyber security, co-PI role in SFI NCF Cyber Shock and Horizon Telemetry, PI in Cyber Explore and led the design/implementation of Ireland’s Cyber Range infrastructure (both mobile and cloud). He is Ireland’s expert in Cyber Range simulation platforms which is a world class cyber security R&I infrastructure and Dr O’Mahony is heavily involved in developing the Cyber Range infrastructure for education, industry engagement, research and cybersecurity services. His exemplary mentorship, leadership and technical skills can be evidenced by his phenomenal achievement in preparing the WorldSkills Ireland cybersecurity team and achieving gold for Ireland at the WorldSkills Global Skills competition in Australia, 2024.