Dr Sarfraz Brohi

Qualifications:

PhD, SFHEA, PGCTL, MSc, BSCS

Position:

Senior Lecturer - Cyber Security

Department:

FET - Computer Science and Creative Technologies

Telephone:

+441173281901

Email:

Sarfraz.Brohi@uwe.ac.uk

Social media:

About me

I am a Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security at UWE Bristol and a Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA). My work brings together three areas that are often treated separately: securing emerging technologies, rethinking education in response to technological change, and supporting the academic standards through which learning is recognised.

I have more than a decade of teaching experience and around seven years of academic leadership across the UK and Malaysia. My career combines the technical expertise of a computer scientist with experience in programme design, curriculum development, academic quality and staff support.

Education that responds to change

My approach to education begins with the relationship between what students learn, how they learn it and what they can subsequently do with that knowledge. I bring technical understanding into decisions about curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, with an emphasis on preparing students to exercise informed judgement as technologies and professional expectations evolve.

I previously served as Programme Leader for MSc Information Technology at UWE Bristol. Under my leadership, the programme achieved 100% overall student satisfaction in the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey in both 2025 and 2026. My earlier appointments at Taylor’s University, Malaysia, included Coordinator of Teaching and Learning and Programme Director, with responsibilities spanning programme design and validation, staff recruitment, teaching and learning, and academic quality.

My advisory and consultancy interests include curriculum and programme development, AI in education, assessment, academic governance and policy, staff development and academic career mentoring. I am particularly interested in how educational change is implemented: how colleagues are supported, how assessment remains meaningful, and how programmes respond to developments in their disciplines.

This interest also informs my research. My work in education has developed from educational data mining to investigating educators’ perceptions of agentic AI, including its potential applications, governance challenges and institutional readiness for adoption. It connects my experience of academic leadership with questions now facing universities about teaching, assessment and the responsible use of AI.

Securing technologies as they evolve

A consistent question runs through my technical research: what happens when a promising technology encounters adversarial behaviour, sensitive information or decisions that people need to understand and question?

My early research examined privacy-preserving cloud storage, followed by work in Internet of Things and unmanned aerial vehicle security. My current interests encompass agentic AI, large language model security, adversarial and explainable AI, and secure UAV communications.

Recent contributions include embedding-based detection of indirect prompt injection attacks in LLMs, quantification of the effects of adversarial perturbations on healthcare AI models, and interpretable federated learning for brain tumour classification. I have also contributed a comprehensive review of the agentic AI and LLM research landscape.

In healthcare applications, including brain tumour and breast cancer detection, my research considers both the robustness of predictions and the interpretability of model decisions. My work in UAV security includes secure communication protocols and interoperability between MAVLink and STANAG 4586. I currently supervise doctoral research on homomorphic encryption for UAV communications.

I have published more than 65 peer-reviewed papers, attracting over 3,000 citations. I have secured and contributed to funded projects totalling more than £200,000, with support from organisations including the British Council and Taylor’s University. These activities include Smart and Sustainable Cities: Connecting Bristol with Kuala Lumpur, followed by knowledge exchange with the Ministry of Education Malaysia on applying UK smart-city governance approaches in a Malaysian context. Other funded projects have addressed air-pollution modelling and visualisation, its effects on health, and the development of a big-data analytics and cloud platform for educational data mining.

Contributing to standards, scholarship and people

Alongside my teaching and research, I contribute to the scrutiny and development of academic provision across institutions. I have more than nine years of external examining experience and currently serve as an External Examiner for the University of Gloucestershire, University of Technology Bahrain and Lancaster University, where my appointment covers Computer Science and Cyber Security provision delivered with Deakin Lancaster Indonesia.

I have also been appointed by UWE Bristol as a Quality Assurance Moderator for its international partner provision at the Transport and Telecommunication Institute in Latvia and Villa College in the Maldives. These responsibilities provide an international perspective on assessment design, moderation, programme quality and academic standards, complementing my experience of programme development and supporting teaching colleagues.

I have supervised and examined doctoral research across IoT, UAVs, digital twins, blockchain variants and software fuzzing, and have supervised more than 50 master’s projects. My contribution to scholarly review includes more than 100 peer reviews for journals such as IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Computers & Security, Journal of Information Security and Applications, Expert Systems with Applications, and Intelligence-Based Medicine.

I have also supported the wider scholarly community through journal guest editorship, service on conference technical and organising committees, and chairing conference sessions.

My awards recognise contributions to the university community, research and academic achievement. I received the UWE Bristol Staff Award in the Valuing People category in 2025 and the Best Paper Award at ICTIDS in 2019. Earlier distinctions include the Outstanding Student Award for my MSc in Software Engineering from Staffordshire University in 2010 and an International Doctoral Fellowship from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in 2011.

Collaborating with me

I welcome conversations with researchers, universities and professional organisations about secure emerging technologies and the future of higher education. I am open to research collaboration, higher education consultancy, external examiner appointments in Computing, Cyber Security and AI, and invitations to speak on AI in education.

My consultancy and speaking interests include curriculum development, teaching and assessment in the context of generative and agentic AI, staff development, academic standards and responsible institutional adoption.

I also welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers interested in agentic AI security, adversarial robustness and prompt injection in LLMs, homomorphic encryption for UAV communications, and explainable AI in safety-critical settings.

Publications

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