Cristina Nita-Rotaru is a professor of computer science at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of security, distributed systems, and computer networks.

The overarching goal of her work is designing and building secure and resilient distributed systems and network protocols, with an assurance that they provide security and resilience and reach performance goals.

She received Best Paper awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) SafeThings workshop, the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, IEEE’s International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, and IEEE’s International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. She’s also received two Internet Research Task Force/Internet Engineering Task Force Applied Networking Research prizes.

Nita-Rotaru is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award and many awards from Purdue University, including the College of Science Research Award, the Excellence in Research Award, the Seeds for Success award, the College of Science Leadership Award, the College of Science Undergraduate Advising Award, and the Teaching for Tomorrow Award.

She served on technical program committees for numerous conferences in security, networking, and distributed systems including, IEEE and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a member of the steering committee of ACM Wisec and IEEE/International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks and a member of the IFIP working group on dependable computing and fault-tolerance.

Nita-Rotaru was an associate editor for Elsevier Computer Communications, IEEE Transactions on Computers, ACM Transactions on Information Systems Security, Computer Networks, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

She previously served as associate dean of faculty at Northeastern University. At Purdue University, she was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and assistant director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security.