Matthew Hicks has been appointed as an assistant professor of computer science in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. He is one of 27 new faculty members hired by the college for the 2017-18 academic year.
Hicks’ research seeks to address challenges in developing improved security of low-level hardware code, hardware devices for security systems, battery-less devices, and approximate computing techniques used in studying machine energy efficiency. Findings of his lab have been used by military contractors, hardware security startups, and have inspired others in the fields of security and academia to devise code analysis techniques aimed at uncovering malicious hardware.
Prior to coming to Virginia Tech, Hicks was a member of the technical staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he conducted research in a hardware security research group that served as the intersection between academia and the defense industry. Before his appointment at the Lincoln Laboratory, Hicks was a lecturer at the University of Michigan, where he taught courses on security and programming.
In 2016, Hicks won the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Distinguished Paper Award and was a finalist in the Pwnie Awards for Most Innovative Research.
Hicks earned a bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Central Florida in 2006, a master’s in 2008, and a doctorate in 2013; both in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Written by Amy Loeffler
