Raluca Ada Popa

Raluca Ada Popa is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, holding the Robert E. and Beverly A. Brooks Endowed Chair. She leads the Frontier Security team at Google DeepMind and co-founded the RISELab, SkyLab, and DARE diversity program. Her research focuses on systems security, cryptographic computing, and privacy-preserving machine learning. She received her PhD from MIT in 2014, alongside BS and MS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from MIT.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, MIT (2014)
• MS in Computer Science, MIT (2010)
• BS in Computer Science and Mathematics, MIT (2009)

Research Interests: Popa designs systems that compute securely on encrypted data, enabling confidentiality in cloud computing, AI, and collaborative analytics. Her work bridges cryptography and systems, with contributions to secure multi-party computation, hardware enclaves, and decentralized trust mechanisms. Key innovations include CryptDB, Opaque, and Helen, which have influenced industry standards like Microsoft SQL's Always Encrypted service.

Publications & Awards: Over 50+ peer-reviewed papers, including influential work at top venues like USENIX Security, SOSP, and IEEE S&P. Notable awards include the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (2021), Sloan Research Fellowship (2018), and MIT Technology Review's TR35 (2019). Her work has been recognized for advancing secure computing and privacy-preserving technologies.

Advising & Grants: Advisor to over 20 PhD students and postdocs, many of whom hold faculty positions or lead industry research. Recipient of major grants including NSF CAREER Award (2020), Bakar Fellowship (2019), and a $10M NSF Expedition for RISELab. Co-founded Opaque Systems (2021) and PreVeil (2015), with significant industry impact.

Labs & Teams: Co-director of RISELab (Real-time, Intelligent, Secure Systems) and SkyLab (secure cloud and edge computing). Founded DARE to promote diversity in EECS research, connecting undergraduates with faculty mentors.