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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.

Congratulations to Grace Brigham, Rachel Hong, and Yael Eiger for passing their milestone exams this quarter!

• Grace passed her Qualifying Exam, completing the first of three major milestones on the path to a PhD! She presented her work “Examining Risks through a Characterization of the AI Companion Application Ecosystem” to the public and committee members Lucy Qin and Yoshi Kohno.
• Rachel and Yael passed their General Exams (aka dissertation proposal), the last official milestone in the Allen School PhD process before the final defense.
  • Rachel presented her work “Al entanglement: Exploring legal and societal implications of insidious model dependencies in Al development supply chains” to the public and committee members Emily Bender, Jevan Hutson, Jamie Morgenstern, and Yoshi Kohno.
  • Yael presented her work “Technology Before, During, and After Incarceration” to the public and committee members Katherine Beckett, Dan Berger, Jevan Hutson, Yoshi Kohno, and Franziska Roesner.

The Security Lab had some exciting posters at the Allen School Undergraduate/BSMS Research Showcase! Congrats on all their hard work this year!

• Efficient Client-side Auditing for Key Transparency Systems. Tiago Ugarte-Wright, Ally Tribble, Larry Mei, Nirvan Tyagi
• Efficient Auditing for Public Key Infrastructure via Server-Aided Gossiping. Shruti Badrish, Andrew Chen, Alexander Tarnavski, Nirvan Tyagi
• Do websites respect user choice? Zhorzh Zelenkov, Jack Lin, Daniel Ballesteros, Yael Eiger, Franziska Roesner
  • 🏆 Winner of the “People’s Choice” Crowd Favorite Award!
• Privacy Leakage During WiFi Network Discovery and Associated User Harms. Taylor Hansen, Yael Eiger, Franziska Roesner

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.