Cristina Nita-Rotaru is a tenured Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences , where she leads the Network and Distributed Systems Security Laboratory (NDS2) and is a founding member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute . Previously, she was a faculty member at Purdue University from 2003 to 2015. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University M.S. in Computer Science from Politehnica University of Bucharest , Romania Research Focus: Her research lies at the intersection of cybersecurity , distributed systems , and computer networks . She designs and builds resilient distributed systems and network protocols that maintain security, availability, and performance despite faults, misconfigurations, and attacks. Her work integrates formal methods , adversarial testing , blockchain security , and trustworthy AI . Funding & Impact: Her research has been supported by NSF , DARPA , ONR , Google , Ethereum Foundation , and others. She has received numerous awards, including the NSF CAREER Award (2006) and multiple best paper awards at top venues like NDSS , ACM CCS , and IEEE S&P . Scientific Awards: NSF CAREER Award (2006) NETYS 2023 Best Paper Award ACM SACMAT 2022 Best Paper & Test-of-Time Awards IEEE SafeThings 2019 Best Paper Award NDSS 2018 Best Paper Award ISSRE 2017 Best Paper Award DSN 2015 Best Paper Award IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (2016, 2018, 2025) Purdue College of Science Research Award (2013) Purdue Excellence in Research Award (2012) Purdue College of Science Leadership Award (2012) Purdue College of Science Undergraduate Advising Award (2008) Purdue Teaching for Tomorrow Award (2007) Advising & Students: She has advised over 30 PhD and MS students at Northeastern and Purdue. Notable former students include Reza Curtmola (NJIT Professor) , Endadul Hoque (Syracuse University Assistant Professor) , and Max von Hippel (Bencify founding partner) . Labs & Teams: She directs the NDS2 Lab , focusing on network and distributed systems security, with projects spanning blockchain protocols , SDN security , IoT and connected cars , and formal verification of protocols .










