Dr Kimberly Tam is Theme Lead for Marine and Maritime for the Sustainability Mission at the Alan Turing Institute and Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth. The Sustainability mission focuses on the safe decarbonisation of transportation networks, manufacturing processes and critical infrastructure, to create pathways to net zero. The mission uses the tools of data-centric engineering, pioneered by researchers at the Turing in partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a global safety charity with a mission to engineer a safer world. She is also the Chief Scientist of Riskocity Ltd, a start up company that provide cyber-physical risk assessment for marine and maritime assets.
She completed her degree in Computer and System Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (United States of America) in 2012 and her PhD in Information Security in 2014 at Royal Holloway University of London (United Kingdom) which included Machine Learning for the analysis and classification of smartphone malware. After a short time in industry at Hewlett Packard Labs in Bristol in 2015, she went to the University of Plymouth to help start a new research group around maritime cybersecurity, one of the world’s first. Early work on maritime-cyber risk assessment, including quantifying risk, won the 2019 Lloyd’s Science of Risk Prize and was the foundation for the Riskocity Ltd spin out company. She was the Co-I on an EU Horizon 2020 Project called Cyber-MAR and was both Co-I and academic lead of the Research England Cyber-SHIP lab. She is also PI on projects on cyber-resilience of AI being used for autonomous vessels. She became a lecturer in 2019 and became the Theme Lead for Marine and Maritime within the Data-Centric Engineering programme at the Alan Turing Institute in 2023. In 2025, the ‘marine and maritime’ theme became part of the Sustainability mission of the Environment and Sustainability grand challenge.