penggao

Peng Gao

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech

Office: Gilbert Place 4104
E-mail: penggao@vt.edu

Biography: Peng Gao is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Faculty Fellow of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI). He is a Senior Member of both IEEE and ACM. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (with Dawn Song). He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University (with Prateek Mittal, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni) 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 recent focus on intelligent cyber defense, secure agentic AI, and trustworthy computing systems. His work has frequently appeared in leading venues including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, Euro S&P, USENIX ATC, VLDB, ICDE, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, ICSE, and IEEE TDSC, resulting in multiple patents and wide industry adoption. He regularly 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). His honors include the NSF CAREER Award, CSAW Applied Research Finalist (2018), Microsoft Security AI Research Award (2020), Amazon Research Award (2021, 2026), Cisco Research Award (2021), Meta Research Award Finalist (2021), Amazon–VT Initiative Faculty Research Award (2022), and Google Academic Research Award (2025).

Research Interests

Agentic AI for Security, AI Safety and Security, Systems and Network Security, Human-Centered AI and Security, AI for Software Engineering and Science

Prospective students: I am looking for strong and motivated postdocs, Ph.D. students, MS students, and undergraduate/graduate interns to join my lab. If you are interested, please email your CV to penggao.jobs [at] gmail [dot] com. In your message, please include a statement explaining your understanding of our research topics and relevant publications. If you are an undergraduate student, please also attach your transcript.

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