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Xiali (Sharon) Hei is an Alfred and Helen M. Lamson Endowed associate professor in the School of Computing and Informatics at the ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ of ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ at Lafayette since August 15th, 2023. She was an Alfred and Helen M. Lamson Endowed assistant professor in the School of Computing and Informatics at the ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ of ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ at Lafayette from August 2017 to August  15th, 2023. During her sabbatical year of 2023-2024, she visited Dr. Insup Lee at the ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ of ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ at Lafayette, she was an assistant professor at Delaware State ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ from 2015-2017 and an assistant professor at Frostburg State ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ from 2014-2015. Note that Delaware State ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ and Frostburg State ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ are two teaching schools.  Sharon received her Ph.D. in computer science from Temple ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ in 2014, focusing on computer security. Her Ph.D. advisors were Dr. James Du and Dr. Shan Lin (Stony Brook ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ, Jack’s ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ). Her master advisor is Kwok-Yan Lam (Associate Vice President of Nanyang Technological ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ Singapore).  

Her collaborators (past and present) have included Kevin Butler, Sara Rampazzi, Zhiqiang Lin, Insup Lee (ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow), Jie Wu (IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow), Oleg Sokolsky, Fei Hu, and Kevin Fu (ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, Sloan Research Fellow).  

She was awarded Alfred and Helen M. Lamson Endowed Professorship, two Outstanding Achievement Awards in Externally Funded Research, an Achievement Award in Externally Funded Research, two NSF/DoE NAIRR Pilot awards, an NSF Track 4 Faculty Fellowship, an NSF SaTC Small award, two NSF MRI awards, a Meta (Facebook) research award, an NSF ERSCoR RII Track 1 award, an NSF CRII award, an LA BoRSF CEMC Talent Initiative Fund,  an LA BoRSF Seed fund, and a Delaware DEDO grant, IEEE SP 2024 Distinguished paper award, EAI SmartSP 2023 Best paper award, ACM 2014 MobiHoc Best Poster Runner-up Award, Dissertation Completion Fellowship, The Bronze Award Best Graduate Project in Future of Computing Competition, IEEE INFOCOM, and IEEE GLOBECOM ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ travel grant, etc. Also, she earned an M.S. in Software Engineering from Tsinghua ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ. Her papers were published at IEEE S&P, USENIX Security Symp., ACM CCS, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE Euro S&P, RAID, ASIACCS, etc. She is a PC member of the USENIX Security Symp. , IEEE EuroS&P,  PST, IEEE GLOBECOM, SafeThings, AutoSec, IEEE ICC, WASA, etc. She was the general chair of EAI SmartSP 2024. She has been an IEEE senior member since 2019.

Ph.D. of Computer Science, 2014
Temple ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ

M.S. of Software Engineering, 2005
Tsinghua ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ

B.S. of Electronic Engineering, 2002
Xi’an Jiaotong ÑÇÖÞ×ÔοÊÓƵ

• Fast Encryption
• Security of Wireless Medical Devices
• Biometrics security
• Mobile security
• Device Security
• Network Forensics
• AI security and privacy
• Cyber-physical system security
• LLM model security
• Hardware Security
• Acoustic side-channel
• Captcha attacks and design

• [G16] Project Title: SaTC: CORE: Small: Investigating Security and Privacy Issues in Instruction tuned Large Language and Code Models. Total amount: $599,840. 8/1/2024-7/31/2027, NSF, Role:PI, Pending.
• Project Title: Equipment: MRI: Track 1 Development of Metal 3D Printing Research In strument with In-situ Characterization and Closed-loop Control Capability. Total amount: $1,238,821. 7/1/2024-6/30/2028, NSF, Role: co-PI, Pending. 
• Project Title: SaTC: CORE: Small: Mitigating Threats of Physical-Domain Signal Injections on Security, Reliability, and Safety of Sensing and Control Systems. Total amount: $599,984. 7/1/2023 6/30/2026, NSF, Role: PI.
• Project Title: RII Track-4:NSF: Fundamentals of Creating Trustworthy Medical Cyber-Physical Systems Under EMI Attacks. Total amount: $286,453. 1/1/2023-12/31/2024, NSF, Role: single-PI. 
• Project Title: Deep Learning Based Image Segmentation Methods to Identify Grain Character istics for Rock Drilling. Total amount: $50,000. 10/1/2022-9/30/2023, NSF Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI), Role: PI.

• Outstanding Achievement in Innovation Award, 2006
• NSF MRI Award, 2025
• NSF IUCRC Planning Award, 2025
• IRI/BORSF Professorship in Digital Security and Resilience, 2025
• Achievement Award in Externally Funded Research, 2025