Prof. Koushanfar’s CV Can be found here (Last updated March 2026)
Farinaz Koushanfar is currently the Siavouche Nemat-Nasser Endowed Chair Professor in Jacobs School of Engineering (JSOE), and the Henry Booker Scholar Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). She is the founding co-director of the UCSD Center of Machine-Intelligence, Computing, and Security (MICS), and a research scientist at Chainlink Labs. Prof. Koushanfar received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from UC Berkeley (thesis advisor Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli), MA in Machine Learning & Statistics from UC Berkeley (thesis advisor Prof. David Brillinger) , an MS from UCLA (thesis advisor Prof. Miodrag Potkonjak), and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. After finishing her PhD, Prof. Koushanfar was an assistant, associate, and full professor at William Marsh Rice University, where she spent 9 years before moving to UCSD in 2016.
Prof. Koushanfar’s current research addresses several aspects of secure and efficient computing, with a focus on AI-Based Computer Aided Design, AI-driven optimization, hardware and system security, intellectual property (IP) protection, as well as cryptographically secure privacy-preserving computing. Her research has made foundational contributions to all of these domains, including patented invention of the concepts of logic obfuscation/logic locking for both sequential and combinational logic that enabled the first active unique control of chips post-silicon, novel AI-based methods for verifying and assessing chip security, graph-based debugging and verification methodologies, the first automated co-design of data/algorithm/software/hardware for energy efficient and compact deep learning, invention of co-design methods for creation of low overhead robust and safe AI/LLM, the first trigger inversion methodology for detection of AI poisoning attack, creation of the first method for watermarking/ tracing deep AI/LLM models and generative output and attestation on trusted platforms, AI-based generic solvers for combinatorial optimization with constraints, creation of physical proofs of provenance, as well as novel co-design and optimization of algorithm and hardware/software, including co-design with cryptographic constructs for privacy preserving computing.
Her work has linked seemingly disparate fields of logic synthesis and cryptographically secure computing requiring Boolean logic/vector computing, creating many new opportunities for researchers and leading to practical methods for managing function nonlinearities in ciphertext domain.
Professor Koushanfar has published 250+ refereed journal articles and/or conference papers in selective venues across design automation, security, and machine learning. Her projects have been supported by several National/DoD/information funding agencies as well as corporations. She has 25+ issued patents and several pending. Prof. Koushanfar has served on many editorial boards and technical program committees (TPCs), including the editorial board of the Proceedings of IEEE, Executive Committee member of the Design Automation Conference (DAC), Founder of the DAC Security subcommittee and initiator of the Hack@DAC competitions, NDSS'21/22 TPC Chair, and WiSEC'24 TPC Chair.
She has received a number of awards and honors including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award, Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35 (World's top 35 Innovators under the age of 35), Qualcomm Innovation Awards, Intel Collaborative Awards, Samsung SAIT University Leadership Award, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Investigator (YIP), Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator (YIP), Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator (YIP), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, as well as several best paper awards including 8 articles selected to the Top Picks in hardware and embedded systems security, and the ICCAD 10 years retrospective most influential paper award. Dr. Koushanfar is a fellow-elect of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, the Kavli Frontiers of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
Prof. Koushanfar has a strong track record in mentoring star students and younger faculty. Under her co-leadership, UCSD MICS is the most gender-balanced engineering research center in the world. The alumni from her group have gone to leadership positions at top institutions and industrial research labs including Stanford University, Purdue, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA AI Research, Apple Mind, Microsoft Research, and Amazon AI.
Shorter bio for seminar talks:
Farinaz Koushanfar is the Siavouche Nemati-Nasser Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she is the founding co-director of the UCSD Center for Machine Intelligence, Computing & Security (MICS). She is also a research scientist at Chainlink Labs. Her research addresses several aspects of AI-based design automation for validation and security, with a focus on AI/LLM-driven optimization, robust machine learning/LLM under resource constraints, hardware and system security, intellectual property (IP) protection, as well as privacy-preserving computing. Dr. Koushanfar has received a number of awards and honors including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award, Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35, Qualcomm Innovation Awards, Intel Collaborative Awards, Samsung SAIT University Leadership Award, Young Faculty/CAREER Awards from NSF, DARPA, ONR and ARO, as well as several best paper awards. Dr. Koushanfar is an elected fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and the Kavli Frontiers of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).