Wenting Zheng

Wenting Zheng is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), with a courtesy appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She is a core faculty member of CMU's CyLab and co-founder of Opaque Systems, a company focused on encrypted distributed analytics. Her research bridges system security and applied cryptography to enable secure computation in cloud environments and privacy-preserving machine learning.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley (RISE Lab, advised by Raluca Ada Popa and Ion Stoica)
• Bachelor's and Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), mentored by Barbara Liskov

Her research interests center on building secure systems using practical cryptographic techniques. Key areas include encrypted AI, private information retrieval, secure collaborative computation among distrustful parties, and protocols for democratizing cryptography. She emphasizes combining systems and cryptography to enhance security guarantees and enable novel applications.

Article Trends: Her publications span secure multi-party computation, privacy-preserving AI, cloud security, and distributed cryptographic protocols. Topics range from encrypted neural networks to efficient PIR and zero-knowledge proofs, reflecting her focus on practical systems for advanced cryptography.

Scientific Awards:

• Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2021

Teaching & Advising: At CMU, she has taught courses like Distributed Systems (Fall 2021-2025), Secure Computer Systems (Spring 2023-2025), and Security for Software and Hardware Systems (Spring 2023). She collaborates with Ph.D. students (e.g., Edward Chen, Andrew Park) and has mentored Masters alumni now at Amazon, SpaceX, Meta, and UC Berkeley Ph.D. programs.

Labs & Funding: Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, AWS, Cisco, CMU CyLab, Google, and Samsung. She is affiliated with CMU's CyLab and UC Berkeley's RISE Lab during her Ph.D., and co-founded the DARE diversity program for undergraduate research opportunities.