I am an Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. I have a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Bucharest, Romania, and MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. I joined Northeastern University in Fall 2016. Before that, I was a Research Scientist at RSA Laboratories for 9 years. I am the recipient of the Technology Review TR35 award for research in cloud security in 2011 and the Google Security and Privacy Award in 2019. I was on sabbatical at Google Research during the 2022-2023 academic year.
I currently serve on the steering committees of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. I served as Program Committee co-chair for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020, 2021, NDSS 2018 and NDSS 2019.
My recent research is centered around the area of trustworthy machine learning, which aims to analyze the security and privacy of machine learning algorithms and systems. My group is addressing several challenging questions, such as:
  • What are the security risks of using machine learning in critical applications?
  • How can we increase the resilience of machine learning in face of adversarial manipulation?
  • What are the privacy risks of training machine learning models on user data and how can they be mitigated?
  • How can we leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence in cyber applications such as threat detection?