Kar and Parno Receive Professorships

The College of Engineering has announced the most recent faculty members to receive a professorship. As the highest academic award a university can bestow on a faculty member, professorships are reserved for those who show continued contributions in their field.

Professorships are established to support a particular faculty member or a field of research, both of which are critical to maintaining world-class quality education and research. Contributions help faculty members pursue a specific field of study, provide funding for graduate student involvement, purchase equipment, or travel to share their research.

With the approval of Provost Garrett, Soummya Kar has been named the Buhl Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Bryan Parno has been named the Kavcic-Moura Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Kar’s research interests include decision-making in large-scale networked systems, stochastic systems, multi-agent systems and data science, with applications in cyber-physical systems and smart energy systems. Kar is a Fellow of the IEEE, and, among other honors, with former ECE Ph.D. student Sérgio Pequito and University of Pennsylvania professor George J. Pappas won the 2016 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Automatic Control Council in the Theory Category.

Parno’s research is primarily focused on investigating long-term, fundamental improvements in how to design and build secure systems. He formalized and worked to optimize verifiable computation, receiving a Best Paper Award (and later a Test-of-Time Award)at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for his advances. He coauthored a book on Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computers, and his work in that area has been incorporated into the latest security enhancements in Intel CPUs.

The campus community will celebrate these honors at a formal ceremony in the coming months.