Swarup Bhunia, Ph.D., has been named as Director of the Institute and the Sachio Semmoto Professor. Dr. Bhunia is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Florida. Dr. Bhunia received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and was an Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University before coming to UF in July 2015. Dr. Bhunia has over 20 years of research experience, with over 250 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He is also the author or editor of 10 educational/reference books in the area of VLSI design, CAD and test techniques. Dr. Bhunia is a senior member of IEEE and serves as associate editor of three IEEE publications. He is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Hardware and Systems Security (HaSS) and associate editor of the Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE) and the Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications (JETTA). Hardware and systems security, food and medicine safety, adaptive and energy-efficient computing, and wearable and implantable systems are among his research interests.

My T. Thai, Ph.D., a UF Research Foundation Professor, has been selected as the Associate Director of the Institute. Dr. Thai was previously the Associate Chair of Research in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2005; and she has been on the faculty of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering since 2006, receiving $6 million in grants over that time. Dr. Thai received an early career award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for 2010-2015 and a young investigator award from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for 2009-2014. She has authored or co-authored more than 250 research papers and received the 2014 IEEE MSN Best Paper Award and the 2017 ICDM Best Papers Award. Her research interests include many areas that touch on the connected world, including blockchain, scalable machine learning, security and privacy, big graph mining, complex network analysis, approximation algorithms and optimization.

Learn more at the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering website.