Kangjie Lu wins NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Kangjie Lu has been selected for a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his project “Whole-Kernel Analysis Against Developer- and Compiler-Introduced Errors.”

This prestigious award provides support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Lu's project aims to combat both developer- and compiler-introduced errors by proposing a set of new approaches and techniques, and by realizing them in a precise and scalable analysis system. The project is expected to improve the security of widely used computer systems, to protect user data and privacy, and to advance knowledge in the fields of security, systems, compilers, and software engineering. In addition, the resulting system will be integrated into educational tools to help raise student awareness of errors and also to improve their skills in writing secure and correct code.

Kangjie Lu has been an assistant professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Minnesota since 2017. His primary research lies at the intersection of security, operating systems, program analysis, and compilers, and also occasionally involves machine learning and computer architecture. He won the best paper award at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in 2019. His research results are regularly published at top-tier venues and have led to many important security updates in the Linux kernel, the Android OS, the FreeBSD kernel, Apple’s iOS, and OpenSSL. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2017.