Yingjie Lao

Yingjie Lao is an Associate Professor at Tufts University in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a secondary appointment in Computer Science. He holds a B.S. from Zhejiang University (2009) and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (2015). Before Tufts, he was an Associate Professor at Clemson University and an IC Design Scientist at Broadcom.

• Research Focus: Trusted AI, hardware security, electronic design automation, VLSI architectures for machine learning, cryptographic systems, and healthcare applications.
• Awards: NSF CAREER Award, IEEE VLSI Prize Paper Award, ISLPED Best Paper Award, and 2023 Best Associate Editor Award (IEEE Transactions on VLSI).
• Grants: NSF-funded projects on photonic PUFs, secure EV operations, and privacy-preserving ML inference.
• Advising: Mentored students including Antian Wang, Azi Famili, Joseph Clements, Weihang Tan, and Jianchi Sun.
• Labs/Teams: Leads research in AI security, hardware security, and VLSI systems, with a focus on photonic PUFs and secure ML accelerators.

His work spans interdisciplinary areas, integrating hardware design with AI security, healthcare, and cryptography. Recent projects include NSF-funded research on optoelectronic hardware security and privacy-preserving neural networks.