Alina Oprea is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, co-director of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Lab, and founding member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. Her research interests are broadly in AI and cyber security, with a focus on adversarial machine learning, machine learning privacy, AI for threat detection, and cloud security.

Oprea is the recipient of the Google Security and Privacy Research Award and MIT Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35 Award for her research in cloud security. She has co-chaired numerous program committees, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Security and Privacy Symposium and the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. She currently serves as associate editor of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Transactions of Privacy and Security journal and the IEEE’s Security & Privacy journal.

Before joining Northeastern, Oprea worked as a research scientist at RSA Laboratories. She earned her doctoral and master’s degrees in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Bucharest.