Dr Othman Esoul studied his PhD (2014-2018) at the University of Leicester researching the use of Data Mining techniques to reverse engineer undocumented network protocols.

Before his PhD, he completed his MPhil (2007-2009) at the University of Salford, working on Virtualisation Technology and the impact of Hardware-assisted Malware on the security of the system software. Dr Othman took up his current position as a Research Associate at the University of Bath and joined the REPHRAIN project in September 2021.

As a member of the REPHRAIN project, Dr Othman’s current research focuses on investigating the impact of the user interfaces on the user’s behaviour to mitigate online harm that originates from Social Network Sites (SNSs). Also, his research focuses on applying Machine Learning and Data Mining techniques within the context of Cybersecurity. This involves a range of diverse applications, such as Reverse Engineering Network Protocols, Deep Packet Inspection of network traffic, and Spam Filtering. In his doctoral research, he used Bioinformatics algorithms to infer the protocol Message Formats from captured network traces.