Magda Lilia Chelly

Early Life

Magda Lilia Chelly was born in 1983 in Kraków, a city in southern Poland. Acting on her father's counsel about the value of an engineering education, she pursued a degree and a master's in Telecommunication Engineering before relocating to France. There she completed a PhD in the same discipline at Telecom SudParis in Évry, France.

Career

Chelly's professional trajectory has spanned IT consulting, university lecturing, business leadership, and cybersecurity advisory work across multiple organizations. In 2016 she established her own cybersecurity startup based in Singapore, positioning herself among a growing cohort of independent security entrepreneurs in the Asia-Pacific region. She is also among the first Tunisian women to serve on the advisory board of the BlackHat Asia Executive Committee, a notable milestone in a field where such representation has historically been limited.

Beyond her commercial work, Chelly has been a consistent advocate for diversity and inclusion in cybersecurity. She is a founding member of Women on Cyber, a non-profit group dedicated to increasing the participation of women in the security industry. She also launched the first Capture the Flag competition for girls in Singapore, an initiative supported by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore.

Research

Chelly's research career began with a focus on indoor positioning systems during her time at Telecom SudParis. Her published work in that area includes papers on combining deterministic and estimation methods for indoor positioning and on the hybridization of Wi-Fi with pseudolites and repeaters for indoor positioning purposes. She subsequently expanded her research interests into cybersecurity and the social dimensions of technology, including a paper examining the impact of social media on home education. She also served as a reviewer for the Annals of Telecommunications volume published by Springer in 2009.

Notable Work

Chelly is the co-author, alongside Hai Tran and Shamane Tan, of Building a Cyber Resilient Business (2022, ISBN 978-1803246482), a practical guide to organizational cybersecurity resilience. She is also the sole author of a science fiction title, Light, Shadow, and Cyber: Vera's Cyber Adventures (2021), which draws on cybersecurity themes in a fictional narrative format.

In addition to her written work, Chelly appeared as a cybersecurity expert in The Dark Web Documentary, broadcast on Channel News Asia. She has also appeared in several short films, including Love Me (Aime-moi, 2009) and Toute la mort devant soi (2009), as well as the production Utopium: Song for an Artist (2008), alongside actress Armelle Deutsch.

Recognition

Chelly has received a number of professional accolades over the course of her career. Among them is recognition as an IFSEC Global Influencer in Security and Fire for 2021, an annual listing that highlights prominent figures in the global security industry.