Spotlight

Shweta Jain, PhD is Associate Professor and Graduate Faculty at John Jay College, serves on the Doctoral faculty at The Graduate Center of CUNY and is Interim Director of the Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Master's program. Her current research is in building eWitness, a solution to authenticate user generated digital photos and videos. This work, jointly with Undergraduate, Masters and Doctoral students, developed a blockchain backed platform to securely store provenance of digital photos and videos. This research is generously funded by both the National Science Foundation and the PSC CUNY Research Award Program to an amount exceeding $550,000 including the most recent grants awarded to build a prototype and to explore commercialization of the technology. 

This spring, Dr. Jain collaborated with colleagues to apply for several National Science Foundation grants. Three of those applications were successful which brought in $650,000 in federal support to the College. The first is a planning grant to assess hardware, software and professional needs for teaching, learning and scholarship at John Jay College. This $100,000 grant is the stepping stone toward more funding from the NSF for infrastructure capacity building. Another $300,000 grant was awarded for exploring pathways from non-STEM majors into Digital Forensics while infusing research in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, creating a plan for a research based 5-year BS-MS program. The third is a $250,000 research and development grant to build a prototype of eWitness, demonstrating the technology as a tool for grassroots journalism.

Dr. Jain came to John Jay in 2016 after six years of service at York College, CUNY. She has mentored both undergraduate and graduate students in her 10 years as an educator. At John Jay, she has mentored PRISM and OSRC scholarship recipients. She has advised Doctoral and MS thesis students, including: Her doctoral student, Nur Dean, who successfully defended her thesis in August 2020 is now Assistant Professor at SUNY Farmingdale State College. Her current student, Priyanka Samanta is working toward her Doctoral dissertation where she is developing techniques to detect image manipulation. Shweta Jain’s recent mentee Kei Nemoto is now a Data Scientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. While Rose Wong, a graduate of our CS program is a Doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center. 

Shweta Jain has 15+ years of experience in Research and Development. Shweta has supervised various undergraduate and graduate students during her career. She has 20+ publications in the area of network architectures, wireless network protocols and blockchain applications. Her doctoral and Masters degrees in Computer Science are from Stony Brook University and she did her Post-doctoral study at Winlab Rutgers University. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and recipient of the 2014 IEEE Region­1 award for Outstanding teaching. For more information about Dr. Jain’s work, please visit https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/shweta-jain.