I’m an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. My research focuses on computer security, with an emphasis on the human factors affecting security professionals. I’m interested in understanding the processes and mental models of professionals who are required to perform security tasks daily such as secure development, vulnerability discovery, network defense, and operational security to provide research-based recommendations for education, policy, and automation changes to best leverage human intelligence against challenging computer security problems.

I am also the director of the Tufts Security and Privacy Lab (TSP; pronounced “teaspoon lab”).

Note: I have limited openings for talented, motivated students If you are interested, please apply to the Tufts’ Computer Science Department here. Also, drop me an email telling me: (1) that you applied and (2) what interests you about human factors in security and privacy research.

Students

I am pleased to work with some excellent graduate students, including:

• Ron Thompson (CS PhD)
• James Mattei (CS PhD)
• Carson Powers (CS PhD)
• Hamza Khalid (CS PhD)
• Tomi Idowu (CS PhD)
• Sarah Radway (Harvard)

I also work with some great research assistants, including CJ Burton, Luke Boshar, Cordelia Ludden, Perucy Mussiba, Matthew Soto, and Kathy Quintanilla, Suvi Lama, Lisa Dang.

Students I have supervised or worked closely with in the past: Samantha Katcher, Ben Altschuler (now at Speakology AI), Pavel Nabutovsky (now at Quoin), Nickolas Gravel (now at Raytheon), Madeline McLaughlin (now at MIT Lincoln Labs), Sam Cohen (Colby College ugrad), Christopher Pellegrini (now at Northeastern), Matthew Ung (now at CMU), Jasper Geer (now at UBC), Ellis Hale (UMBC ugrad), Esam Nesru (UMBC ugrad), Yaejie Kwon (Swathmore ugrad), Yijun Liu (Elon University ugrad), Gustavo Curioso (now at Redline Trading Solutions), Santana Koring’ura, Kamran Mirza, Leigh Tanji, Arie Itzhacki, Yuan Han, Liana Wang (now at Apple), Seth Rabin (UMD CS ugrad, now at Wayfair), Desiree Abrokwa (UMD CS ugrad), Mary Nicole Dugay Punzalan (UMD CS ugrad, now at Lockheed Martin) and Eric Zhang (UMD CS ugrad).

Affiliations

• Tufts Security and Privacy Lab (TSP)
• Tufts Cybersecurity Center for the Public Good (CyPuG)
• Tufts Institute for Research on Learning and Instruction (IRLI)

Previously

• Maryland Security, Privacy, and People Lab (SP2)
• Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2)
• Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL)
• Carnegie Mellon University’s Cylab