Bio/CV

Farinaz Koushanfar is a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she directs the Adaptive Computing and Embedded Systems (ACES) Lab, and the founding co-director of the UCSD Center for Machine-Integrated Computing & Security (MICS). Before joining UCSD, she was a faculty in the ECE Department at William Marsh Rice University. Prof. Koushanfar received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as her M.A. in Statistics from UC Berkeley. Her research addresses several aspects of secure and efficient learning, with a focus on hardware and system security, robust machine learning under resource constraints, intellectual property (IP) protection, as well as privacy-preserving computing.

Professor Koushanfar is a research scientist at Chainlink Labs. She also serves as an associate partner of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing to aid developing solutions for the next generation of embedded secure devices. She has received a number of awards and honors for her research, mentorship, teaching, and outreach activities 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 2008 (World’s top 35 innovators under 35), Young Faculty/CAREER Awards from NSF, DARPA, ONR and ARO, as well as several Best Paper Awards. Dr. Koushanfar is a fellow of the Kavli Foundation Frontiers of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of IEEE.

For more information: see the complete CV and faculty profile.