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 co-founded Opaque Systems and serves as a core faculty member at CyLab Security and Privacy Institute.

• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from UC Berkeley
• M.Eng. and Bachelor’s degrees from MIT under Barbara Liskov

Her research focuses on system security and applied cryptography, particularly systems enabling “sharing without showing.” Key areas include secure cloud computation, collaborative privacy-preserving analytics, and practical cryptographic frameworks for machine learning. Recent work emphasizes encrypted AI (e.g., Cinnamon), secure multi-party computation (e.g., Silph), and private information retrieval (e.g., PIANO).

Notable scientific honors include the Berkeley Fellowship (2014-2016), IBM Research Fellowship (2017-2018), and the USENIX Security 2021 Distinguished Paper Award. She has advised numerous Ph.D. and Master’s students, including collaborators at CMU and UC Berkeley.

• Teaching: Distributed Systems, Secure Computer Systems, Cryptosystems: Theory and Practice
• Research grants from NSF, AWS, Cisco, Google, Samsung, and CMU CyLab
• Co-founder of DARE, a diversity-focused research mentorship program