Vijay Varadharjan is currently the Professor and Chair of the School of Computing and IT at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, from January 1995. He is also the Director of the Distributed System and Network Security Research at UWS.

Prior to taking up this appointment, Professor Varadharajan was responsible for Security Research at corporate Hewlett-Packard Labs based in Europe at HP Labs.,UK. He has worked also with various HP Divisions in the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy. He has been with HP since 1988. Prior to HP, he was a Research Manager at British Telecom Research Labs. U.K., from 1987 till 1988. From 1985 till 1987, he was Research Fellow and Lecturer in Computer Science at Plymouth and Reading Universities. He did his Ph.D in Computer and Communication Security in the U.K in 1984, which was sponsored by BT Research Labs. He did his Electronic Engineering degree from Sussex University, UK (1978-1981). At Sussex University, he was awarded every year the Best Student Prize, and he was also awarded the 1981 Prize of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, IEE for outstanding performance.

Professor Varadharajan has technically led, managed and successfully delivered on numerous research projects in Secure Systems funded by European Commission, Hewlett-Packard Labs., SERC and British Telecom Labs. in UK and USA. After coming to Australia in 1995, he has research projects funded by both Large and Small Australian Research Council Grants and UWS Grants as well as sponsored projects from industry. His research work has contributed to the development of several secure systems in the areas of Secure Distributed Applications, Secure Network Systems, Security Tools, Secure Mobile Systems as well as Cryptographic and Smart Card based Systems. His current areas of interest include secure distributed authorization systems and policies, secure high speed networks such as ATM, secure electronic commerce and payment models, secure mobile agents, wireless security, security models and architectures, and security protocols and cryptography.

Professor Varadharajan has also acted as consultant and has been architect for several projects in computing, financial and telecom organizations in the UK, US and more recently in Australia. He has also acted as an Expert for European Union and worked with the UK Dept. of Trade and Industry, and has worked several European Research Projects such as COST, EUREKA and ESPIRIT. Vijay has also participated in several International Standards activities such as ISO, ECMA, OSF, CCITT/ITU, IEEE, British and Australian Standards and the European Union.

Professor Varadharajan has published more than 130 papers in International Journals and Conferences, has co-authored a book on Network Security and has edited a book on Information Security. He has also written over 40 technical reports for HP, BT, EU and SERC/DTI.

Professor Varadharajan has been a member of Programme Committees and chaired sessions in several major international conferences and workshops over the years. Recently, this included the IEEE International Conference on Research in Security and Privacy (1995,1996), European Symposium on Research on Security and Privacy, ESORICS (1994, 1996), ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (1995, 1996,1999), International Conference on Distributed System and Network Security SNDSS (1997), Australasian Conference on Security and Privacy (1996, 1997:General Chair and Programme Co-Chair, 1998, 1999), IEEE/IFIP Conference on Distributed Systems and Operations Management DSOM (1997: General Co-Chair), IEEE Local Computer Networks Conference, LCN'98 (1998,1999), DEXA Security Conference (1999), Information Security Workshop (Program Co-Chair 1999), part of International Conference on Parallel Processing ICPP (1999) and International Conference on Information and Computer Security (1997, and General Chair and Program Co-Chair 1999) and General Co-Chair of Healthcom'99.

Professor Varadharajan is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), a Fellow of the IEE (FIEE), a Fellow of the IMA (FIMA), Fellow of the Australian Insitute of Engineers (FIEAust), a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (FACS) and a Member of the IEEE. He is also the Director of the Computer Science Technical Board, Australian Computer Society. He is also listed in the Marquis' Who is Who in the World.