Biography
Dr. Mihai Christodorescu joined Visa Research as a Principal Research Scientist in 2017, and shortly thereafter was promoted to Sr. Director in 2018, where he is leading a team in fundamental and applied research in a number of security areas, including advanced cryptography, secure multi-party computation (MPC), post-quantum cryptography (PQC), secure systems, and more. Prior to joining Visa, Mihai was a Senior Researcher at Qualcomm Research Silicon Valley. Before joining Qualcomm, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM, and he also worked as a Principal Scientist at Securitas Technologies, Inc. His previous work focused on internet-scale security analysis of networks, systems and software, and whole-system security hardening for both cloud and mobile endpoints.
He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2007 and 2002, respectively, and received his B.S. in Computer Science, with high honors, from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999. His research interests are in fundamental approaches to computer security and privacy problems by combining methods from multiple domains–such as, programming languages, machine learning, behavioral modeling and formal methods. Dr. Christodorescu holds 25 patents and has published more than 35 papers in several international conferences and journals, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference on Computer and Communications Security (IEEE CCS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Association for Computing Machinery (IEEE ACM), Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), and many more.