Nicolas Papernot

Nicolas Papernot is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, affiliated with the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering), the Department of Computer Science (Faculty of Arts & Science), and the Faculty of Law. He holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute and serves as a Co-Director of CIFAR’s Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program, with an International Chair at Inria (2025–2027). His work bridges security, privacy, and machine learning, focusing on trustworthy AI systems.

• Education: PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University (Google PhD Fellow), followed by a year at Google Brain.

His research explores privacy-preserving machine learning (e.g., differential privacy, cryptographic auditing), security vulnerabilities (model extraction, adversarial examples), and machine unlearning. Recent projects include generative model collapse, verifiable unlearning, and privacy bounds in collaborative learning. His publications span top venues like NeurIPS, IEEE S&P, and ICML, with best paper awards at ICLR 2017 and outstanding paper at ICLR 2022.

Scientific awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2022), Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars (2023), Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow (2024), McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction (2024), and ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Early-Career Researcher Award (2024). He co-founded the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy ML (SaTML) and chairs the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2026–2027).

His research group, the CleverHans Lab, advises PhD and Master’s students, including Varun Gupta, Andrei Muresanu, and Angela Sha. Collaborative efforts involve institutions like Google DeepMind, CIFAR, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. For prospective students, he encourages applications to UofT’s Computer Science or ECE (Software Systems) programs.