Group photo of Dr Emily Rozier, Head of Funding, Graduation & Awards, Birmingham University, student Hasan Khanani, Jay Johal, Senior Account Manager, MetaCompliance on the University of Birmingham campus
Photo L to R (Dr Emily Rozier, Head of Funding, Graduation & Awards, Birmingham University, student Hasan Khanani, Jay Johal, Senior Account Manager, MetaCompliance)

A University of Birmingham student has won a scholarship prize worth £1,000 from global cyber security firm MetaCompliance.

Mechanical Engineering student Hasan Khanani scooped the prize after competing with students from over 20 universities across the world.

MetaCompliance launched the scholarship contest to promote a greater awareness of cyber security and assist students with their higher education fees. To enter the scholarship contest, students were asked to write an essay on what they thought were the top three cyber security threats facing Generation Z.

Of his award, Hasan said: “Raising awareness is essential to preventing cybercrime, and I'm proud to be working alongside MetaCompilance to achieve this and I'm very grateful for this award."

MetaCompliance CEO, Robert O’Brien, commented: “Hasan demonstrated a real grasp of the subject matter and accurately conveyed the real and pressing threats that his generation is facing.

“The feedback from the scholarship program was extremely interesting and a recurring theme in essays from students across the world was a lack of personal cyber security awareness and a general apathy to the seriousness of this threat.

“This highlights the importance of raising awareness in this particular age group and we hope the scholarship program has encouraged students to think more about how they can improve cyber security practices in their day to day lives.”

Dr Emily Rozier, Head of Funding, Graduation & Awards at the University of Birmingham added: “I am delighted that Hasan has won the Metacompliance Scholarship and heartily congratulate him on his achievement.

“It’s great that MetaCompliance is engaging students with this important issue. I hope that the competition continues to attract strong entries for 2020.”

The University of Birmingham's Centre for Cyber Security and Privacy is recognised by the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in partnership with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR).

The University also offers a Cyber Security Masters/MSc course which provides students with the skills they need to deal with current and future cyber security threats.