Brandon Reagen, an assistant professor affiliated with the NYU Center for Cybersecurity and the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at NYU Tandon, has earned a 2024 National Science Foundation Career Award. One of the most prestigious recognitions for young researchers, the award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. Along with the honor, Reagan will receive a five-year NSF grant of $500,000 to support his fundamental research in creating hardware and compilers to accelerate privacy-preserving computation, including fully homomorphic encryption that enables computation on encrypted data to keep data protected at all times.
By being selected for the 2024 award, Reagen joins seven of his CCS colleagues who have previously won this recognition. It also continues NYU Tandon’s strong track record when it comes to young investigator honors. More than half of the school’s faculty have received CAREER Awards or similar honors, including 12 such recognitions since 2019.
“I’m incredibly excited to have won this award,” Reagen told NYU Tandon News, which announced the honor on February 9, 2024. He added that “the grant will enable students to develop cutting-edge hardware accelerators to provide the computational horsepower necessary to speedup these emerging computational paradigms. In addition, we’ll be able to expand our research scope beyond hardware and construct compilers.”
“Brandon Reagen is working at the cutting-edge of cybersecurity and computing, and this award recognizes the enormous potential of his research,” noted NYU Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević. She added, “The advancement of privacy-preserving computation will have profound implications for security, healthcare, sustainability, and scientific research, and I am thrilled to see this technology being pioneered at our school.”
In addition to his work in privacy-preserving computing, such as his achievements in the arena of Fully Homorphic Encryption that were featured in IEEE Spectrum last November (see https://spectrum.ieee.org/fully-homomorphic-encryption), Reagen has also focused on creating specialized hardware accelerators for applications like deep learning. His contributions include strategies for lowering the barrier of using accelerators as general architectural constructs, including benchmarking, simulation infrastructure, and System on a Chip (SoC) design.
You can read more about Reagen’s work and the award at https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/nyu-tandon-researcher-wins-nsf-career-award-support-acceleration-privacy-preserving#.