CyLab names 2026 Presidential Fellows

Each year, CyLab recognizes high-achieving Ph.D. students pursuing security and/or privacy-related research, with a CyLab Presidential Fellowship, covering an entire year of tuition.

This year’s CyLab Presidential Fellowship recipients are:

Alper Çakan

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science Department

Advised by Aayush Jain and Vipul Goyal

Research Focus: Quantum cryptography and theoretical computer science

Edward Chen

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science Department

Advised by Wenting Zheng and Fraser Brown

Research Focus: Building secure and optimized systems for various cryptographic protocols

Isadora Krsek

Ph.D. Student, Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Advised by Sauvik Das and Laura Dabbish

Research Focus: Usable privacy and security and social computing

Tomas Gonzalez Lara

Ph.D. Student, Machine Learning Department

Advised by Giulia Fanti and Aaditya Ramdas

Research Focus: Algorithmic and statistical foundations of modern machine learning, with emphasis on optimization, generative modeling, and collective decision-making under differential privacy

Yanzi Lin

Ph.D. Student, Software and Societal Systems Department

Advised by Lorrie Cranor and Sarah Scheffler

Research Focus: Societal computing, usable security and privacy, and digital identities

Jenny Tang

Ph.D. Student, Software and Societal Systems Department

Advised by Nicolas Christin and Lujo Bauer

Research Focus: Examining the interplay between political science and computer science constructions of security, as well as ways to improve security and privacy for groups that are often overlooked by the academic community

Muhammed Ustaomeroglu

Ph.D. Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advised by Guannan Qu

Research Focus: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and interpretability in neural networks

Xiaoyuan Wu

Ph.D. Student, Software and Societal Systems Department

Advised by Lujo Bauer

Research Focus: Usable security and privacy, societal computing, human-computer interaction, and human-centered natural language processing