New Faculty Member Highlight: Dr. Sara Rampazzi

Shreya Saxena
Dr. Sara Rampazzi has recently joined the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World, and she will start as an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering on January 1st, 2021. Her research areas include cyber-physical systems security, embedded systems design, modeling, and simulation with applications in Healthcare, Automotive, and the Internet of Things. Dr. Rampazzi’s work focuses on investigating security risks and developing hardware and software defense strategies against hardware-based and physics-based attacks. Her ACM CCS’19 work on attacking LiDAR-based perception in self-driving cars has been recognized by Forbes as the first practical attack against LiDAR systems. Dr. Rampazzi’s most recent work Light Commands presented at USENIX Security 2020 on injecting inaudible and invisible commands to smart home devices using lasers has been covered by CNN, New York Times, Ars Technica, Wired, ABC and NBC News, and other media outlets.

Dr. Rampazzi is currently a Research Investigator at University of Michigan, working with Kevin Fu on sensor security. Recently she received the RAPID SaTC COVID19 Award from the National Science Foundation to tackle the urgent needs to prevent the spread of the virus COVID-19 with decontaminated, reused masks. The project will define easily deployable, secure, self-sustainable, scalable sensor technology for safe decontamination of N95 masks, to be used by rural hospitals and under-resourced facilities around the world under emergency masks shortage.

Dr. Rampazzi completed her PhD in Electronics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, at University of Pavia in Italy (2014). Then she worked in the automotive and space fields before joining University of Michigan in 2017.

“I study phenomena that happen at the boundary between computer science, electronics, and physics, to reveal vulnerabilities that can compromise integrity, availability and confidentiality of systems. My goal is to establish new security-based design principles for future generations of cyber-physical systems and technologies that incorporate security from their very conception.” said Dr. Rampazzi. For more details about her research and how to join her lab, please visit: https://sararampazzi.com/ .