I am an associate professor at UC Berkeley. I am interested in security, systems, and applied cryptography.
I co-founded and co-direct the
RISELab, a lab aiming to build systems that are secure and intelligent

,
and the
DARE program for promoting diversity and equity.
As faculty, I was awarded a
Sloan Research Fellowship,
J. Lepreau Best Paper Award,
J. and D. Gray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Computer Science,
Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship,
NSF CAREER,
Bakar Faculty Fellowship, and I was selected to the list of
35 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review.
Starting with 2021, I have been a co-founder and the President of
Opaque Systems.
Starting with 2015, I have been a co-founder (and served as CTO) of
PreVeil.
Before joining UC Berkeley, I did a one-year postdoc at ETH
Zürich in the System Security group led by
Srdjan Capkun.
Before that, in 2014, I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at
MIT, my thesis being about building practical systems that compute on encrypted data. My PhD thesis was awarded a
George M. Sprowls Award for best MIT CS doctoral theses.
My advisor was
Nickolai
Zeldovich, and I was also fortunate to work closely with
Hari Balakrishnan in systems, and with
Shafi Goldwasser,
Yael Kalai, and
Vinod Vaikuntanathan in cryptography.
I earned my
Masters of Engineering in Computer Science in 2010 and my two Bachelors in
Computer Science and Mathematics in 2009 also from MIT.
News
- Our paper on MAGE was awarded the J. Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI 2021.
- I am grateful for the 2021 Jim and Donna Gray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Computer Science.
- My PhD student Rishabh Poddar co-founds and serves as CEO of Opaque Systems, a VC-funded startup for secure cloud analytics.
- My PhD student Wenting Zheng accepts an assistant professor offer at CMU.
- I am grateful to UC Berkeley and the Brooks family for the Brooks endowed chair.
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We are open-sourcing many of our projects on secure collaborative computation in our MC2 project.
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I taught a new graduate class on Decentralized Security: Theory and Systems, which includes hands-on tutorials on MPC, ZK proofs, and cryptocurrency wallets.
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Thanks to the NSF for the NSF Expedition award for RISELab, $10 million.
DARE
In early 2019, I launched

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, a diversity program aiming to match strong undergraduates, many from underrepresented backgrounds, with EECS professors for research. With help from EECS, we developed a web application system for DARE.
As of June 2020,
30 professors are part of DARE, and a total of about 41 undergraduate students, many from underrepresented backgrounds, have engaged in research with EECS faculty.
Workshop
I am a Program Chair and organizer of CCS 2020 workshop
PPMLP: Privacy-preserving machine learning in practice.
PC committees
- SOSP 2021
- IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2020
- SOSP 2019
- NSDI 2019
- OSDI 2018
- NSDI 2018
- NDSS 2017
- Eurosys 2017
- VLDB 2017
- CCS 2016
- Usenix Security 2016 (also served as the poster chair)
- Eurosys 2016
- IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2015