Author: Franziska Roesner

Among the awards given out at the Allen School graduation are student and faculty teaching awards. This year, Security Lab members were honored in both categories! Evan Lam (Security Lab MS ’26 graduate) won the Bob Bandes Teaching Award and Nirvan Tyagi (Security Lab faculty member) won the (newly renamed — congrats, Hal!) Hal Perkins Undergraduate Teaching Award. Congratulations to Evan and Nirvan, and thank you to the many CSE 484 (Undergraduate Computer Security) students who have joined us for part of their time in the Allen School!

We are so excited to introduce this year’s Security and Privacy Research Lab graduates:

• Pranav Gopalkrishnan, MS
• Evan Lam, MS
• Dr. Rachel McAmis, PhD
• Dr. Tina Yeung, PhD

It has been such a pleasure having you all as colleagues and lab members, and we can’t wait to see what you all do next!! Congratulations!! 🎓

Congratulations to Dr. Tina Yeung, who successfully defended her dissertation on June 2 and graduated with her PhD on June 12!! Her dissertation is titled “Measuring Harms and Empowering Users: Case Studies in Online Advertising and Generative AI” and was advised by her committee consisting of Franziska Roesner (chair, UW), Joe Calandrino (CMU), Tadayoshi Kohno (Georgetown), Emily Tseng (UW), and Mako Hill (GSR, UW). Dr. Yeung will be joining the California Privacy Protection Agency, known as CalPrivacy, very soon.

Ongoing research by Security Lab PhD student Yael Eiger, along with collaborators Meira Gilbert and Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, into how AI chatbots can be used to find personal information about individuals was covered by Eileen Guo in MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/13/1137203/ai-chatbots-are-giving-out-peoples-real-phone-numbers/.

UW Security Lab PhD student Grace Brigham is quoted in this article from the Indicator (“AI companion apps are a nonconsensual nightmare”) about her research — with collaborators Yoshi Kohno and Lucy Qin — into how ads on Meta’s platforms promote AI companion apps that enable the nonconsensual use of others’ likenesses. More about Grace’s and collaborators’ work here: https://gracebrigham.substack.com/p/how-ai-companion-apps-enable-and

Read Security Lab PhD student Yael Eiger‘s blog post on technology in Washington prisons over at the Washington History Project: The Desire and Disdain for Technology in WA Prisons. Yael’s dissertation work is exploring technology (especially harms) within the U.S. carceral system.

Congratulation to Security Lab PhD alum Dr. Miranda Wei on receiving the Allen School’s 2025 William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award! You can read their dissertation “Against Online Abuse and Toward Sociotechnical Security & Privacy” here: https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/items/74f4ea0d-a0ea-47c7-a9a7-6e4e5dfb3727.

The Allen School has announced a set of six grand challenges for the future of computer science, including this one:

How do we anticipate and address security, privacy, and safety issues as technologies permeate society?

As technology permeates every aspect of our lives and societies, it has the potential to fundamentally change many things for the better. But realizing the potential benefits also requires sustained, thoughtful focus on the security, privacy, and safety risks that may and do arise from new technologies and their applications in new contexts. Anticipating, uncovering, documenting, mitigating, and avoiding such risks is an inter-disciplinary endeavor, requiring advances in technology, theory, design, law and policy — as well as in our understanding of how individuals and communities relate to technology. We bring together researchers and educators across the Allen School and the University of Washington whose work aims to lead us towards a safer, more secure, and more privacy-preserving future through technologies that ultimately better serve people and society.

Needless to say, we agree with the importance of this Grand Challenge! Read more here about the challenge and see all the great Allen School faculty involved in addressing this challenge, from the Security and Privacy Research Lab and beyond.

Congratulations to Security Lab PhD student — now PhD candidate — Tina Yeung! Tina just recently passed her General Exam (aka dissertation proposal), the last important official milestone in the Allen School PhD process before the final defense.