Kartik Nayak Named Google PhD Fellow

Kartik Nayak, a third-year doctoral student in computer science working in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), was recently named a Google Ph.D. Fellow. He was one of only 39 students in North America, Europe and the Middle East to receive this prestigious award. Google established the Ph.D. Fellows program in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in computer science and related disciplines.

Nayak’s research is directed toward improving the efficiency of privacy-preserving computation. He is working on techniques for improving the efficiency of secure computation, including leveraging the use of parallelization and and designing more-efficient oblivious data structures.

Nayak is advised by Jonathan Katz, professor of computer science and director of MC2, and Elaine Shi, assistant professor at Cornell and adjunct faculty member of computer science at the University of Maryland.