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. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (2019-2021). He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2019 and his B.E. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2013. His research spans security and privacy, systems and networking, and artificial intelligence. His work focuses on designing scalable, intelligent, secure, and trustworthy solutions to address real-world security, privacy, and computing challenges. His research has been published at multiple top-tier venues including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, VLDB, USENIX ATC, ICDE, ICSE, and EuroS&P, and has been demonstrated through patents and industry adoption. He has received multiple honors and awards, including the 2018 CSAW Applied Research Finalist, the 2020 Microsoft Security AI Research Award, the 2020 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 2025 NSF CAREER Award.