NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Narasimha Rao Alugoju is a cybersecurity engineer and researcher at Peraton who is solving one of the hardest problems in cybersecurity today — detecting attacks that have never been seen before.

Every security team’s worst nightmare is a zero-day attack. No signature. No patch. No warning. Traditional AI tools are completely blind to these threats because they only recognize what they have already seen. Narasimha developed a groundbreaking AI framework that thinks differently — combining the pattern-recognition power of neural networks with human-like logical reasoning to detect unknown threats proactively, before damage occurs.

His peer-reviewed research on Neuro-Symbolic AI for Zero-Day Threat Detection was independently evaluated by expert reviewers and received Outstanding ratings across every category — Originality, Innovation, Technical Merit, and Applicability — a rare distinction that validates both the novelty and real-world relevance of his work.

But Narasimha does not just research cybersecurity — he lives it. When the WannaCry ransomware attack crippled organizations worldwide in 2017, he personally engineered a remediation framework that restored over 400,000 infected endpoints across Fortune 500 companies and government agencies — reducing failure rates by 90% when no standard solution could. During COVID-19, he built an automated system that seamlessly migrated 17,000 federal employees to remote work tools with zero outages — keeping critical government operations running during a national emergency.

His work has saved over $2 million in operational costs, protected critical infrastructure, and advanced the science of AI-driven cyber defense through published, peer-reviewed research.
Narasimha represents exactly what AI security innovation looks like — original thinking, real-world impact, and contributions that protect people at national scale.