Lichao Sun

Lichao Sun is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2020), and bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research focuses on AI security and privacy, addressing vulnerabilities in AI systems, particularly in large language models and multimodal systems. He also explores data mining, federated learning, and reinforcement learning applications.

His educational background includes:

• Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago (2020)
• M.S., Computer Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• B.A., Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Research interests emphasize mitigating security threats in AI, including adversarial attacks (backdoors, token-level vulnerabilities), robust watermarking, and privacy-preserving techniques in federated learning. His work integrates vision-language models, multimodal reasoning, and ethical AI safety. Recent studies highlight innovations in secure embedding aggregation, generative AI defenses, and strategic reasoning in LLMs.

Publications (2025) reflect a focus on AI security, multimodal systems, and reinforcement learning applications, with contributions to conferences like CCS, NeurIPS, and AAAI. His research bridges theoretical advancements with practical cybersecurity solutions for modern AI architectures.

No scientific awards explicitly mentioned in the provided text. His advising and grants details are not detailed here, though his prolific publication record suggests active research funding. No lab/teams explicitly referenced in the input data.