Our Purpose
The Hampshire and Sussex Cluster is a newly established cluster formed in 2025 aimed at fostering a thriving cyber security ecosystem across Hampshire and Sussex. Our primary purpose is to support, connect, and empower regional academics, businesses and government originations, enabling them to maximize their collective impact on the national cyber security landscape.
As a part of the UK Cyber Cluster Collaboration (UKC3), we are dedicated to facilitating collaboration among various cyber security organizations and professionals within Hampshire and Sussex. By creating opportunities for effective partnerships, we aim to enhance knowledge exchange, share best practices, and identify emerging needs and opportunities within the industry.
Our mission is to nurture both new and existing clusters by providing guidance, resources, and seed funding for impactful initiatives. We strive to stay informed about industry trends and share valuable insights with our clusters, helping them adapt and grow in an ever-evolving cyber security environment.
The Hampshire and Sussex Cluster also focuses on driving economic growth within the cyber security sector. We work closely with public and private sectors, as well as academia, to create a robust network that supports innovation and development. Our goal is to ensure a healthy pipeline of skilled cyber professionals and to foster a vibrant and innovative cyber industry for the future.
Meet our Directors
Basel Halak
MSc, PhD, SFHEA, NTF
Associate Professor of Secure Electronics
Director of the Cyber Security Academy
Electronics and Computer Science School
University of Southampton
Dr Basel Halak an Associate Professor of secure electronics and the Director of the Cyber Security Academy with the University of Southampton. He is also leading European Masters in Embedded Computing Systems (EMECS) . Dr Halak is a visiting scholar at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern ,Norwegian University of Science and Technology , and Polytechnic di Torino. He previously served as a visiting professor at the Kazakh-British Technical University 2017.
Dr. Halak’s expertise spans Digital Systems Design, Hardware Security and Applied Cryptography. and he has authored over 100-refereed conference and journal papers, and seven books, including the first textbook on Physically Unclonable Functions, and the first book on Hardware Supply Chain Security. Beyond academia, Dr. Halak has collaborated extensively with industry such as ARM, Arqit, Schneider Electric, and Ericsson.
Dr Halak is the recipient of the industrial fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the National Teaching Fellowship awarded by the Advance Higher Education(HE) Academy . He actively contributes to the global research community as a member of technical program committees for leading conferences such as HOST, IEEE DATE, IEEE DAC, IVSW, ICCCA, ICCCS, MTV and EWME. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE access and a Guest Editor of the IET circuit devices and system journal. As of November 2024, he has supervised to completion 15 PhD students and 7 post-doctoral scholars.
Robert Morgan
CITP/CPSA/IASME
Assessor/Cyber Essentials Plus Assessor/Cyber Essentials Cyber Advisor
Director of Factory Internet.
Robert has 20+ years industry experience working within defensive and offensive cyber with a career spanning multi-national critical infrastructure providers through to smaller organisations and everything in-between.
His time is spent across a mixture of Cyber and Strategic tasks within Factory and it’s customers.
Nick Allott
BSc, PhD, FBCS, FIAP, FRSA
Nick is CEO of NquiringMinds, an AI analytics company developing state of the art cyber security infrastructure. He has been developing and deploying AI technologies for almost 30 years
Nick was formally, CTO of OMTP, a security focussed, international mobile standards organisation responsible for many technologies now widely deployed. Significant among OMTP deliveries, is the Trusted Execution Environment, (TEE) the security core of most CPUs and SIM technology. Nick is also a Director of the Webinos Open Source Foundation: a collaborative initiative for secure IOT interaction based on PKI.
For Shell, Nick helped develop their data mining products (later acquired by Accenture). And as Technology Director for Motorola, Nick had responsibility for their speech recognition and voice Personal Assistant products. Nick Joined start-up Fastmobile (multimodal speech recognition) as their CTO in 2000 until their acquisition by RIM. His first full time job was developing neural networks for Neural Computer Sciences, followed by a stint at the part Microsoft owned Dorling Kindersley Multimedia, where he worked on search technology and 3D graphics platforms.
Nick advised the UK Government on the Secure by Default Program and was among a handful of technology CEOs selected by the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, to accompany on her first trade mission to India. Nick is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Analysts and Programmers and the Royal Society of Arts, has a degree in Cognitive Science, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton.