Yupeng Zhang to join Texas A&M faculty

Electrical and Computer Engineering Ph.D. student Yupeng Zhang will join the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University as a tenure-track assistant professor in fall 2019.

Prior to joining the Texas A&M faculty, he will spend a year at University of California, Berkeley, as a postdoc with Dawn Song.

Yupeng’s research involves applied cryptography and security, and is focused on improving security for cloud computing by developing new schemes with better privacy and integrity guarantees. At Maryland, he is co-advised by Prof. Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou (ECE/UMIACS/MC2) and Prof. Jonathan Katz (CS/UMIACS/MC2).

“I am particularly proud about Yupeng's new position at Texas A&M since he has been my first student (we joined UMD together!),” says Prof. Papamanthou. “I am confident Yupeng will drive a very successful research agenda in the near future and I am looking forward to his next discoveries. Yupeng's thesis proposes new systems for zero-knowledge proofs (a primitive that has found many applications in privacy-preserving blockchains). With his systems, we have been able to scale verifiable computation to millions of CPU instructions, something that was considered particularly challenging a while back.”

Yupeng is a recipient of the Google Ph.D. Fellowship and the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award from the University of Maryland.

"Yupeng's Ph.D. work was impressive, and led to fundamental advances related to verifiable computation,” adds Prof. Katz. “I am extremely pleased that he obtained a faculty position, and I wish him much success in the future."

Published June 5, 2018