Profile Details

Following a deep passion for teaching inspired by his mother, a state award winning teacher in the government school education system, Dr. Manu V. T. completed B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from NIT Calicut and pursued Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad (Central University), based on research carried out at the Center of Excellence in Cyber Security, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT, established by the Reserve Bank of India). He did M.Tech in Computer Science with specialization in Digital Image Computing from Department of Computer Science, University of Kerala, Kariyavattom Campus, Trivandrum, Kerala, India. During Ph.D, he was fortune to work under the guidance of Prof. B. M. Mehtre, who pioneered India’s first Automated Fingerprint Identification System through his seminal work in fingerprint identification, a technology later deployed across multiple state police departments in India and internationally. His research output includes peer-reviewed publications in Elsevier’s Forensic Science International (SCI, Q1) and Springer’s Signal, Image and Video Processing (SCIE, Q2), along with multiple conference papers and book chapters indexed in Scopus. At IDRBT, he managed teams of more than 25 members in multiple Cyber Drills for Indian Banks as part of IBCART and CISO forums, supporting their preparedness and incident response as per RBI mandate. He also participated in CERT-In coordinated national Cyber Security Mock Drills, forensic lab setup, and delivered hands-on training programs for banking and FinTech professionals. His forensic lab work included configuring and managing the FRED Forensic Workstation and tools such as EnCase, Oxygen Forensics, and Paraben SIM card seizure suites. He is a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and an ISO 27001:2022 ISMS Lead Auditor. His research interests include image forensics, tamper detection, multimedia security, forensic toolchains, and cyber defense analytics.