Bio

Peng Gao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Faculty Fellow with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI). He is an IEEE Senior Member and an ACM Senior Member. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his B.E. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research lies at the intersection of security and privacy, systems and networking, and AI, with a focus on designing scalable, intelligent, and trustworthy solutions to real-world security, privacy, and computing challenges. His work has been published at multiple top-tier venues including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, EuroS&P, USENIX ATC, VLDB, ICDE, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, and ICSE, and has resulted in multiple patents as well as industry adoption. He frequently serves on the program committees of major security and systems conferences and is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the 2018 CSAW Applied Research Finalist, the 2020 Microsoft Security AI Research Award, the 2021 Amazon Research Award, the 2021 Cisco Research Award, the 2021 Meta Research Award Finalist, the 2022 Amazon-VT Initiative Faculty Research Award, the 2025 Google Academic Research Award, and the 2026 Amazon Research Award.