New NSF award supports innovative role-playing game approach to strengthening research security in academia
Grant and Award Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 21-Feb-2026 05:11 ET (21-Feb-2026 10:11 GMT/UTC)
A new project in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois aims to strengthen research security by using structured role-playing games (RPG) to model the threats facing academic research environments. The NSF-funded project, titled "REDTEAM: Research Environment Defense Through Expert Attack Modeling," addresses a growing challenge: balancing the open, collaborative nature of academic research with increasing national security risks and sophisticated adversarial threats. Traditional cybersecurity and compliance frameworks often overlook the human factors that shape real-world decision-making in research environments, where collaboration pressures, funding incentives, and international partnerships can introduce unexpected risks. This project aims to help universities better understand these dynamics by examining the human and behavioral dimensions of research security.
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