Paul Gillen

UCD Alumni Award in Science 2024

MSc 2005 Computer Science

Paul Gillen, Managing Director and Country Lead for Barclays Bank in Ireland and Chief Security officer for Barclays Bank in Europe, is also the global head of Cyber, Fraud and Internal Security Transformation teams, where he leads Cyber Security transformation at the bank, one of the world’s largest and most systemically important. Paul joined Barclays in London in 2015 from the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) in the Hague where he was EC3’s founding Head of Cybercrime Operations and Intelligence from 2012 to 2015. Paul has been working in cyber and fraud since 1996 and was the founder of what is now the Garda Cybercrime Bureau. As a graduate of UCD, he was also co-founder of the UCD Centre for Cyber Security and Cybercrime Investigation. Paul was founding chairperson of Europol’s European Cybercrime Training and Education Group (ECTEG) and he was also founder and co-chair of the European Union Cybercrime Task Force (EUCTF), a group made up of all the Heads of Federal Police Cybercrime Units across the EU.

Paul is one of only 400 recipients of the Scott Medal for valour by the Garda Síochána for his part in the rescue of kidnapped supermarket executive Don Tidey in 1983. Paul was awarded a Fellowship of the Irish Computer Society in 2021 for a lifetime contribution to cyber security.