About

Professor David M. Nicol is the Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also serves as the Director of the Information Trust Institute and the Director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center in Singapore. His research interests include trust analysis of networks and software, analytic modeling, and parallelized discrete-event simulation. His work has led to the founding of the startup company Network Perception and election as a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM. Nicol is the co-author of the widely used undergraduate textbook 'Discrete-Event Systems Simulation' and has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching and research, including the ACM SIGSIM Outstanding Contributions award and recognition as a Titan of Simulation. Prior to his current position, he served on the faculties of Dartmouth College and the College of William and Mary, where he also received teaching honors. His academic background includes a B.A. in mathematics from Carleton College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Virginia.

Research topics

• Biology
• Computational biology
• Genetics
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Operating system
• Telecommunications
• Real-time computing
• Mathematics
• Algorithm
• Statistics
• Evolutionary biology
• Distributed computing

Selected publications

• Auto-SGCR: Automated Generation of Smart Grid Cyber Range Using IEC 61850 Standard Models

  IEEE Open Journal of the Industrial Electronics Society · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Digitalization of power grids have made them increasingly susceptible to cyber-attacks in the past decade. Iterative cybersecurity testing (i.e., red-team testing or penetration testing) is indispensable to counter emerging attack vectors and to ensure dependability of critical infrastructure. Furthermore, these can be used to evaluate cybersecurity configuration, effectiveness of the cybersecurity measures against various attack vectors, and to train smart grid cybersecurity experts defending the system. Facilitating extensive experiments narrows the gap between academic research and production environment. A high-fidelity cyber range (a virtual cybersecurity testbed emulating smart grid systems) is vital as it is often infeasible to conduct such experiments and training using production environment. However, the design and implementation of cyber range requires extensive domain knowledge of physical and cyber aspect of the infrastructure. Furthermore, costs incurred for setup and maintenance of cyber range are significant. Moreover, most existing smart grid cyber ranges are designed as a one-off, proprietary system, and are limited in terms of configurability, accessibility, portability, and reproducibility. To address these challenges, an automated Smart grid Cyber Range generation framework (Auto-SGCR) is presented in this paper. Initially a human-/machine-friendly, XML-based modeling language called Smart Grid Modeling Language (SG-ML) was defined, which incorporates IEC 61850 System Configuration Language (SCL) files. Subsequently, a toolchain to parse SG-ML model files and automatically instantiate a functional smart grid cyber range was developed. The developed SG-ML models can be easily shared and/or modified to reproduce or customize for any cyber range. The application of Auto-SGCR is demonstrated through case studies with large-scale substation models. The toolchain along with example SG-ML models have been open-sourced.

  PublisherDOI

• PA6 Enhanced personalised care for testicular cancer survivors. The Empower Pathway: An audit of the first 150 patients

  European Urology · 2025-03-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Reflection Test of Time: RINSE: the real-time immersive network simulation environment for network security exercises

  2025-06-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• DPU-LARD: DPU-Leveraged Attestation of Remote Devices for Security of OT Networks

  Lecture notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering · 2025-08-30

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Re: Prognostic Factor Risk Groups for Clinical Stage I Seminoma: An Individual Patient Data Analysis by the European Association of Urology Testicular Cancer Guidelines Panel and Guidelines Office

  European Urology · 2024-08-06

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• 708P The Empower Pathway: An audit of the first 150 patients. Enhanced personalised care of testicular cancer survivors

  Annals of Oncology · 2024-09-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Management of Small Testicular Masses: A Delphi Consensus Study

  European Urology Oncology · 2024-11-04 · 9 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Toward Common Weakness Enumerations in Industrial Control Systems

  IEEE Security & Privacy · 2023-07-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The storyline of MITRE’s common weakness enumeration framework illustrates how the security and privacy technical community can collaborate/cooperate with policy makers to advance policy, giving it specifics and filling gaps of technical knowledge to improve security and resilience of critical infrastructure.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• European Association of Urology Guidelines on Testicular Cancer: 2023 Update

  European Urology · 2023-05-12 · 225 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  CONTEXT: Each year the European Association of Urology (EAU) produce a document based on the most recent evidence on the diagnosis, therapy, and follow-up of testicular cancer (TC). OBJECTIVE: To represent a summarised version of the EAU guidelines on TC for 2023 with a focus on key changes in the 2023 update. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: A multidisciplinary panel of TC experts, comprising urologists, medical and radiation oncologists, and pathologists, reviewed the results from a structured literature search to compile the guidelines document. Each recommendation in the guidelines was assigned a strength rating. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS: For the 2023 EAU guidelines on TC, a review and restructure were undertaken. The key changes incorporated in the 2023 update include: new supporting text regarding venous thromboembolism prophylaxis in males with metastatic germ cell tumours receiving chemotherapy; quality of life after treatment; an update of the histological classifications and inclusion of the World Health Organization 2022 pathological classification; inclusion of the revalidation of the 1997 International Germ Cell Cancer Collaborative Group prognostic risk factors; and a new section covering oncology treatment protocols. CONCLUSIONS: The 2023 version of the EAU guidelines on TC include the highest available scientific evidence to standardise the management of TC. Better stratification and optimisation of treatment modalities will continue to improve the high survival rates for patients with TC. PATIENT SUMMARY: This article presents a summary of the European Association of Urology guidelines on testicular cancer published in 2023 and includes the latest recommendations for management of this disease. The guidelines are a valuable resource that may help patients in understanding treatment recommendations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Message Authentication and Provenance Verification for Industrial Control Systems

  ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems · 2023-07-06 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Successful attacks against industrial control systems (ICSs) often exploit insufficient checking mechanisms. While firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and similar appliances introduce essential checks, their efficacy depends on the attackers’ ability to bypass such middleboxes. We propose a provenance solution to enable the verification of an end-to-end message delivery path and the actions performed on a message. Fast and flexible provenance verification (F2-Pro) provides cryptographically verifiable evidence that a message has originated from a legitimate source and gone through the necessary checks before reaching its destination. F2-Prorelies on lightweight cryptographic primitives and flexibly supports various communication settings and protocols encountered in ICS thanks to its transparent, bump-in-the-wire design. We provide formal definitions and cryptographically prove F2-Pro’s security. For human interaction with ICS via a field service device, F2-Profeatures a multi-factor authentication mechanism that starts the provenance chain from a human user issuing commands. We compatibility tested F2-Proon a smart power grid testbed and reported a sub-millisecond latency overhead per communication hop using a modest ARM Cortex-A15 processor.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Survivable Trust for Critical Infrastructure

  NSF · $215k · 2002–2004

• IUCRC Phase I: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Center for Infrastructure Trustworthiness in Energy Systems (CITES)

  NSF · $720k · 2021–2027

• Survivable Trust for Critical Infrastructure

  NSF · $343k · 2003–2006

Frequent coauthors

• Jason Liu

  29 shared

• Philip Heidelberger

  27 shared

• Albert Greenberg

  Microsoft Research (United Kingdom)

  24 shared

• Rory Johnson

  University Hospital of Bern

  24 shared

• Lars Feuerbach

  German Cancer Research Center

  23 shared

• Montserrat Puiggròs

  21 shared

• Alexander Martínez-Fundichely

  Presbyterian Hospital

  21 shared

• Kathleen H. Burns

  21 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1990

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1986

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1983

Awards & honors

• Alumni Fellowship Award, given by the William and Mary Socie…
• Research Honors (2022) Titan of Simulation, Winter Simulatio…
• Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair in Engineering, 2020
• Franklin W. Woeltge Professorship in Electrical and Computer…
• Best paper award, Conference on Principles of Advanced and D…