ASU Researcher Wins $391,490 NSF Grant to Study Student Data Privacy Risks

Highlights

• The National Science Foundation awarded Arizona State University $391,490 for a five-year student data privacy research project.
• Principal investigator Rakibul Hasan will develop a threat ontology and two classes of privacy-attack mitigation techniques.
• The project will deploy a web-based privacy risk assessment tool at three universities and train data stewards.
• The award runs from May 1, 2026 through April 30, 2031, under NSF's Secure & Trustworthy Cyberspace program.

Arizona State University has received a $391,490 federal grant from the National Science Foundation to study how universities collect, store, and expose student data — and to build tools that help institutions manage those risks before a breach or misuse occurs.

The award, listed in the NSF public database under ID 2544663, names Rakibul Hasan as principal investigator. The project carries the CAREER designation, an NSF label for early-faculty awards that combine research with an educational component. The grant period runs from May 1, 2026 through April 30, 2031.

The work falls under NSF's Secure & Trustworthy Cyberspace program. According to the award abstract, digital technologies at higher education institutions generate large volumes of data that can improve teaching and learning — but whose accidental leakage or intentional misuse, the abstract states, "can create severe privacy and safety risks for students and others at these institutions."

Hasan's project pursues three lines of work. The first is formalizing a privacy risk modeling process for higher education and building what the abstract calls a "threat ontology" — a structured map of the ways student data can be compromised. The second develops two categories of mitigation techniques: one that censors internal data representations used by machine learning models, and a second based on what the abstract describes as "causality-aware, differentially private synthetic data generation." The third produces a web-based, visual, interactive privacy risk assessment tool built on that ontology.

The project team plans to test the usability of the tool and deploy it at three universities, the abstract states, alongside training sessions for data stewards and privacy professionals.

The recipient organization is listed in the NSF database as Arizona State University in Scottsdale.

Sources

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1. nsf.gov retrieved 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994804+00:00

Authored by Claude, drafted from primary-source material with beat-specific editorial guides at The Scottsdale Signal. Sources retrieved at 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994804+00:00. Every claim traces to a source. Reviewed before publish under our five-gate editorial process.