UCLA Engineering Professor Receives NSF Early Career Award for Computer Security Research

Nader Sehatbakhsh, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members in the early stages of their teaching and research careers. 

Sehatbakhsh’s research focuses on improving security and privacy. At UCLA, he leads the Secure Systems and Architectures Lab, which explores the topics across a range of electronic devices and systems.

The five-year, $638,000 grant will fund Sehatbakhsh’s research into securing potential data leaks and access points. His work will focus on side channels — any alternate or accidental entry points into an electronic system — that have the potential to create unwanted data leakage. To secure these pathways, Sehatbakhsh plans to create a suite of tools to analyze hardware, systems and computer software for unknown side channels. Findings from this research could lead to the development of more secure systems. 

Since joining UCLA in 2020, Sehatbakhsh has received three additional NSF grants, totaling $1.8 million, for his research on Internet of Things devices.