UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Dongwon Lee, professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has been named Frymoyer Chair in Information Sciences and Technology, effective July 1. The Frymoyer Chair recognizes outstanding academic achievement and supports continued excellence in research, scholarship and graduate education.
The three-year appointment provides a faculty member in the College of IST with the opportunity to continue and further scholarly excellence through contributions to instruction, research and public service with the intent to foster the use, benefits and effectiveness of information sciences worldwide.
“I am deeply honored to be appointed the Frymoyer Chair,” Lee said. “This recognition is especially meaningful given the chair’s distinguished history and the colleagues who have held it before me.”
The current holder is Anna Squicciarini, professor in the College of IST's Department of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics. Previous holders include Jack Carroll, distinguished professor emeritus in the College of IST, and Vasant Honavar, IST professor and Penn State’s vice provost for artificial intelligence (AI).
Endowed in 2000 by the Frymoyer Foundation — which is led by Edward Frymoyer, emeritus member of the College of IST Dean’s Advisory Board and president of Frymoyer Holdings Inc. — the chair was one of the first endowed academic positions created in the then-School of IST.
“Dongwon is an internationally recognized scholar whose work has had a lasting impact on institutional excellence, research innovation and academic community-building,” said Andrea Tapia, dean of the College of IST. “This professorship, combined with his role as inaugural head of IST’s Privacy and Security Informatics Department, will further advance his leadership in research, education and governance. We are deeply grateful to Ed for the important Frymoyer Chair and the opportunities it creates for outstanding faculty like Dongwon.”
Lee, who holds a doctoral degree in computer science from UCLA, joined the College of IST in 2002. His previous administrative roles in IST include director of doctoral programs and acting interim associate dean for research. He was a Fulbright Cybersecurity Scholar hosted by the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 2022, and has served as a faculty visitor at institutions across the globe.
Lee’s research lies at the intersection of cybersecurity, data science and social computing. His research team, the Penn State Information, Knowledge, and Web (PIKE) Research Group, focuses on information integrity, including AI alignment, misinformation detection, AI-text detection and social media fraud mining. He will expand on that work in Germany this summer via a fully funded fellowship from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies and Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.
Lee is currently leading a team of Penn State students in the 2026 Amazon Nova AI Challenge global finals, competing against nine elite university teams worldwide, and he serves as the principal investigator of the U.S. National Science Foundation CyberCorps Scholarship for Service Program at Penn State. He also is affiliated with the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
He is the author or co-author of more than 260 conference papers and journal articles. His published research has been honored with best paper awards at technical conferences, and his work has been covered by major press outlets such as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among others.
“My research has long focused on making information ecosystems more trustworthy, secure and resilient — from misinformation and deepfakes to AI safety and hallucination to AI-enabled cyber threats,” Lee said. “I am grateful to the college for its support and look forward to using this opportunity to advance impactful research, mentor the next generation of scholars and contribute to the college’s continued leadership at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity.”
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