Teodora Baluta

Teodora Baluta serves as an Assistant Professor and the Alan and Anne Taetle Early Career Professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, Georgia Institute of Technology, where she leads research at the critical intersection of computer security and machine learning. Her work focuses on establishing rigorous security analyses for machine learning systems through algorithmically sophisticated yet practically applicable approaches.

Her academic foundation was built at the National University of Singapore (NUS) through graduate studies supervised by Professors Prateek Saxena and Kuldeep S. Meel:

• National University of Singapore (NUS) - Graduate Studies

Dr. Baluta's research program spans computer security, machine learning, and formal methods with concentrated expertise in differential privacy, security verification for neural networks, and causal reasoning applications. She investigates membership inference attacks, model unlearning mechanisms, and security challenges in large language models while maintaining strong connections to real-world security problems through publications in premier venues like CCS, NDSS, SAT, FSE, and OOPSLA.

Analysis of her publication trajectory (2017-2025) reveals an evolving research focus from foundational security work on taint analysis and insider threats toward cutting-edge investigations into AI security. Recent publications demonstrate increasing specialization in large language model security, privacy-preserving techniques for graphs, and causal approaches to security verification, establishing her as a leader in securing next-generation AI systems.

Her research excellence has been recognized through:

• Google PhD Fellowship
• EECS Rising Stars 2023
• Dean’s Graduate Research Excellence Award
• President’s Graduate Fellowship
• Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Finalist, Asia-Pacific

While current student mentorship details are not publicly specified, her Early Career Professorship indicates an active research group development phase. Her doctoral work at NUS was conducted within the KISP lab and MeelGroup, and she now establishes her independent research direction at Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy.

Current research activities center on advancing security frameworks for machine learning systems, with particular emphasis on developing formal verification methods for neural networks and privacy-preserving techniques applicable to real-world deployment scenarios.