Jakub Szefer Joins ECE Faculty Team

Jakub Szefer will join Northwestern Engineering in January 2025 as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Szefer is currently an associate professor of electrical engineering at Yale University and director of the Computer Architecture and Security Lab.

Szefer’s research lies at the intersection of computer architecture and hardware security. He aims to advance the security of various cloud-based computing systems: from cloud-based classical processors, through cloud-based machine learning accelerators on reconfigurable logic, to now cloud-based quantum computing systems.

Using a computer architecture and hardware-centric approach, Szefer studies how the design and operation of computing systems and hardware impacts their security. He also investigates security vulnerabilities in modern computing systems and designs protections to thwart future security attacks.

Szefer is the author of Principles of Secure Processor Architecture Design (Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2018), the first book in the field to focus on processor architecture security. He is also a co-editor of the first book focused on the security of cloud-based field programmable gate arrays, titled Security of FPGA-Accelerated Cloud Computing Environments (Springer, 2023).

Szefer earned a US National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2017. He was a finalist in the 2022 Bell Labs Prize, which recognizes game-changing innovations in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In 2021, he received Yale University’s Ackerman Award for Teaching and Mentoring.

Szefer is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

Szefer earned doctoral and master’s degrees from Princeton University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.