Miriam Leeser

Miriam Leeser is a Professor and Associate Chair of Research in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. She leads the Reconfigurable and GPU Computing Lab, focusing on heterogeneous architectures, FPGA accelerators, and their applications in wireless communications, machine learning, and data privacy. Her work emphasizes practical implementations of theoretical advancements, such as cloud-edge computing frameworks and secure multi-party computation using FPGAs.

Leeser holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. She has been at Northeastern since 1996 and is a Senior Member of both the IEEE and ACM. Notable recognitions include the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award and her status as a Charter Member of the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Contributor Program.

Her research portfolio includes projects funded by the NSF on topics like resilient cloud infrastructure (CAREFREE), cross-layer wireless coexistence, and FPGA-enabled secure computation. The Reconfigurable Computing Lab develops tools and libraries to simplify accelerator usage, particularly for emerging applications in IoT, medical imaging, and 5G/6G systems.

• Key Projects: CAREFREE, P4-based FPGA Testbeds, Secure Function Evaluation via FPGAs, MIMO Systems Acceleration
• Grants: Over $2M in NSF awards for cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity
• Labs: Reconfigurable and GPU Computing Lab (RCL)

Leeser’s publications span FPGA optimization, hardware-software co-design, and privacy-preserving technologies. Recent work highlights include accelerating large language models with token-adaptive quantization and low-latency optical wireless transceivers.