URBANA – An electrical engineering professor has been tapped to head the University of Illinois' program in trustworthy and available computing.

Professor David M. Nicol is the new director of the Information Trust Institute, succeeding Professor William H. Sanders, who became director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Nicol, a professor at the UI since 2003, has worked with the institute since it was created.

He said Friday the center works on issues beyond Internet security.

"Trust is more than just security. A trustworthy system does what you want when you want it, and only that," even when there are attacks or outside technical problems, Nicol said.

The Minnesota native was at the College of William and Mary and Dartmouth College, where he served as chair of the Department of Computer Science and helped to establish a similar program, the Institute for Security Technology Studies, before joining the UI.

He earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of Virginia in 1985.

Nicol said that since he came to the institute, it has moved to the forefront in studying the relationship between the power grid and trustworthiness.

"There has been an explosion of interest in that area," he said, since the nation "woke up" to the perils of damage to the grid with an economy based on information.

"A fair amount of investment has been made by the government," Nicol said, including National Science Foundation support of the UI's work.

He said a hacker or terrorist could potentially damage the nation's information infrastructure with an attack on the power supply.

"It has not happened yet that a hacker or terrorist has knocked down a power grid, to anyone's publicized knowledge," he said.

"But there is evidence foreign hackers have tried."

Knowledge of that attempt could help the UI institute anticipate and prevent future attempts, the professor said.

In a press release, Ravi Iyer, the interim vice chancellor for research at Illinois, said "David Nicol is a world leader in the security and trust field, and an educator of outstanding merit with the ability to take (the institute) to the next level in its evolution."