Robert Shoniwa

Robert T Rosenthal Shoniwa is an Engineer and cybersecurity specialist with a BTech in Computer Science and an MTech in Information Security and Cyber Forensics. He is also a Certified Ethical Hacker. His passion lies in cybersecurity and the development of collaborative research solutions which have seen him present research papers and projects at Ubuntunet-Connect 2016 and 2017 in various countries in Africa so far. This has resulted in his collaboration with organizations such as ZIMREN (the Zimbabwe Research and Education Network), the University of Oxford’s Lab Hackathon initiative (the first ever in Zimbabwe) and being the lead local coordinator for the Data Carpentry Foundation's first Data Carpentry workshop in Zimbabwe. He also spearheaded the running of the very first national Capture-the-Flag contest in Zimbabwe (Zim-CTF 2019) under the Ministry of ICT and Cybersecurity as part of the National Technical Committee spearheading the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October 2019..

Away from his day job as a cybersecurity consultant and the head of Information Security and Assurance at the Harare Institute of Technology, Robert is also a part of a number of organizations including ZICT, the ICT division of the Zimbabwe Institute of Engineers (ZIE) where he is the Cybersecurity Lead; the Computer Society of Zimbabwe (CSZ) IT Security Special Interest Group (SIG) where he is a committee member and the Zimbabwe Internet Governance Forum (ZIGF) where he is a member of the Multi-Stakeholder Consultation Team and is responsible for capacity building and stakeholder engagement. He has also played a key role in hosting a number of conferences, workshops and seminars some which were aimed at igniting innovation in young researchers as well as collaborative research and cybersecurity (in partnership with the Zimbabwe Ministry of ICT and Cybersecurity).